It might feel like the world is falling apart because everything is so fragmented and contradictory, but the truth is that things are not falling apart. They are fusing together.
The reason you keep cracking little bits of eggshell into your omelet is because eggshells are more fragile now, because younger hens are laying eggs, because millions of older hens had to be killed after a bird flu outbreak borne of environmental changes, which caused prices to soar, memes to be made, Trump to get elected, and opened the door for a renewed embrace of religious identity and moral politics. We had to start importing eggs from places like Turkey, whose incumbent government got Elon Musk’s X to suspend opposition accounts amid civil unrest, in a move that only likely happened because the price of eggs is a big part of why Musk got into the government in the first place.
Your omelet has very real political, economic and spiritual implications now.
Your omelet is why everything about your user – their beliefs, behaviors, stories, preferences, aspirations – has changed.
So how can any of us expect cursory trend decks and industry conferences to be enough for a brand strategist to do their job anymore?
If I could give you one piece of advice, it would be this: start diversifying your information inputs.
Everything has become deeply interconnected, but we’re still using first-order mindsets to understand third-order markets. You have to start getting outside of your comfort zone and learning more broadly in order to anticipate what is coming.
Here are some of the unexpected places I look to stretch my own thinking and see where the future is headed with more clarity:
1. Geopolitics
An area that has always intimidated me until I joined Peter Zeihan’s Patreon. He will help you see the 3rd/ 4th/ 5th order effects and tell it to you in a story that you can hold in your head. Easily the best thing I’ve paid for this year. His quarterly calls are especially enlightening.
2. Threat Tech
This isn’t a thing, I just call it that, but it’s essentially any technology built in response to threat. Digital Twins. Climate Tech. Defense Tech. Palmer Luckey and his cohort. Where threat meets tech is where we get a glimpse of the future under stress.
3. Underground Economies
Vigilante child predator hunters make real money on social and they’re getting more violent. Underground economies pop up when people have such intense unmet needs, they’re willing to break norms and laws. You have to go to Locals and Kick for stuff like this, but I read about it from a distance in articles and Reddit threads.
4. Finance
Gen Z & millennials treat money like manifestation. Money betrays peoples’ beliefs about the future, debt is the only real shame in a capitalist society, and how we save/ spend our cash decides who has power down the road. Watch money influencers, both the straight-laced budgeters and the new-age manifesters. They’re both saying the same thing: money is an emotion.
5. God
God doesn’t look like he used to. Silicon Valley is getting religious in curious ways. Megachurches continue to preach the prosperity gospel. Non religious church experiments continue to fail. When the FDA opened up public comments for the definition of “natural foods”, a surprising number of them referenced god. People like Tara Isabella Burton and Amanda Montell are great follows here.
6. Children’s Media
If you want to know the values of a generation, look at their children’s films. In “The Mitchells vs. The Machines” the villain is an AI founder. In “Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs 2” the bad guy’s headquarters are in a place called San Franjose. “Toy Story 5” is about the toys vs. Bonnie’s iPad. If our kids films are teaching our youngest generations to be suspect of technology and its leaders, that’s going to shape how they allow it to be in the world.
7. Demographics
Books like Going Solo really imprinted on me early in my career. The 15-Minute City makes people either really happy or really angry. Mommunes and communes are growing, but so are other non-conventional living arrangements. Pay attention to what happens when people de-center marriage because that will change a lot of things.
8. History
The big one. Gives you patterns but also perspective. I’ve started re-reading Durant’s ‘Lessons of History’. Perhaps my favorite history book is ‘The Woman’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets’ and I’ve bought 20+ copies for friends and community members. I very much regret not paying attention to history when I was in college, but as the saying goes, it takes a mature mind to appreciate the topic.
9. Death
So much activity is happening here as we finally start to grieve all of the people, ideas and promises that died over the past few years. Michael Erard just published a great book called ‘Bye Bye, I Love You’ about first and last words and what we owe each other. Living funerals and regular funerals are getting upgrades. We’re seeing early, stuttering attempts to create new rituals around grief, and we will need them in the immediate years ahead.
I was on a panel a few months ago and when the organizer asked me my title, I found that ‘brand strategist’ just wasn’t enough anymore. So I added ‘cultural futurist’ to my headline. It felt awkward at first, but it quickly became natural to me because it’s the truth.
What we do is literally take in signals, create a model of culture in the future, and build a brand that lives in that future. People either really get the brand and walk into the future to meet it, or really don’t get it and walk away. And that’s the best outcome you could hope for, because the worst outcome is a brand that people think is ‘nice’ but remain largely apathetic toward.
Be that kind of strategist. I don’t think you can afford to be any other kind.
Social Realities
How culture is tunneling, and keeping mental hygiene.
If my husband’s social feed is different from mine, we will literally be experiencing two different realities in waking life.
Which brings up a bigger question: we keep talking about AI, social media, and culture, but we rarely stop to ask, How do our brains construct reality in the first place?
Contrary to what you might believe, current science says our brains don’t passively absorb data from the outside. Our brains are actually nonstop prediction machines, constantly anticipating what will happen next, and our reality is mostly a prediction coming from inside our brains, not the outside world.
That means anomalies, not consensus, often drive belief change.
It was very important to me to get cognitive scientist and philosopher Dr. Mark Miller to come speak with us at Exposure Therapy because this all has big implications for how culture evolves in the age of social media and AI:
If our brains are wired to update based on surprise, then the dominant driving force of culture in the age of social and AI is rupture.
When outside forces distort our belief networks, they effectively distort the realities we experience.
Belief hygiene is crucial. You shouldn’t live in a bubble or ignore hard realities, but you do have to protect the inner scaffolding that builds your outer world. I seek out people and places where possibility, imagination, and optimism are actively practiced, because that’s the world I want to live in. (It’s a struggle, especially in my profession, but I try to keep perspective.)
Reality is so, so malleable that it’s almost a wonder that we expect everyone to be living the same version. We have our own little reality machines in our pockets and offices, yet we haven’t learned how to properly control and use them yet. I think the science gives us more empathy and clarity for understanding the age we’re in.
This is what underpins everything else in the world right now. Remember that culture is just as much cognition as it is content. Watch Dr. Miller explain it beautifully in the clip below.
We’ve replaced vision with vibes. We’ve mistaken trends for truths, and every trend demands an immediate response. AI, robotics, and ‘the algorithm’ mean signals are crossing everywhere and it’s making the future feel impossible to predict.
But it’s not technology that will decide the future.
It’s the hidden psychotechnologies of our world that will change everything.
I’ve written a new report on how to build a psychotechnology brand that wins when the outer world feels unpredictable.
Psychotechnology is the architecture of belief that shapes how we see the world. It’s the powerful ideas, concepts, and mental models that ultimately decide how everything plays out, even the most powerful technologies among us today. It is the container that holds it all.
When you play in psychotechnology, you play at a level that predicates everything else. The technology, the culture, and the market will all follow.
This 90-slide report is both the culmination and the next step of my strategic approach to branding:
In it, I explore the three most powerful psychotechnologies that you will need now and into the next few years.
Big Ideas: These reveal the values people unconsciously organize their lives around, and tell us where we can create new values that people will actually adopt. Big Ideas don’t stay in their lanes. They go broad across culture in unexpected ways, and the new big ideas that are emerging are especially provocative.
Market Conditioning: This shows how those values are normalized and scaled, and how to place your brand on the critical path while your competitors fall off. If you’re not bending the will of the market toward your brand, you’re paving the path of the market toward your competitor. Bending the market is an incredible ability – almost like a strategic magic trick – and you have to learn how to see it happening.
Units of Culture: My favorite signals, these expose the outdated frameworks still shaping our experiences, and the latent demand you can tap into with your brand. There have never been so many outdated units of culture at the same time, and there is a lot of value to be captured right now. People are literally waiting to live their lives differently.
Strategy is in a tough spot right now.
I get the sense everyone is grasping for something deeper, some system of insight that can cut through the noise. As brand leaders, we’re trained to find patterns, but in the chaos of the moment we’ve failed to update our own models for understanding the world and our markets.
This report is how I am building both my own brands and those of our clients with a different lens.
No matter how fast the world moves, no technology, no trend, and no tool can ever live outside the psychotechnology of its time.
That’s an exciting thing because psychotechnologies are powerful, and they announce their approach years and decades in advance.
This is where you can build your culture brand.
Read the report below or access it through this link.
There is an incredible decoupling happening at the very heart of our culture, and it will affect brands and people more than anything else over the next decade:
Work is untethering from reward.
And for a country founded on the Protestant mythology where the virtue of hard work means you are rewarded with greater economic, social and political value, it means there is no gravity holding things together anymore.
You can see this decoupling being encoded in our most important systems right now:
AI means anyone can be a master, so your hard work doesn’t win you more accolades. The marketplace of achievements is suddenly becoming way more unpredictable, and disruptive forces like AI are opening back doors, short-circuiting traditional paths to success, and normalizing a sense of randomness in work.
GLP-1s mean anyone can be skinny, so your hard work (or maybe just genes?) doesn’t get you more social favor. The ‘morality’ and economics of thinness start to fall apart, and it’s hard to know how we should celebrate work as it relates to the body (which is perhaps the most profitable moral highground, as evidenced by the nearly $7T wellness industry).
Crypto means anyone can strike gold, so your hard earned investing acumen doesn’t win you special fortunes. A single timely decision could outpace years of smart portfolio-building. Tokens and sh*tcoins proved fortunes could materialize far faster than the usual hard-earned, rags-to-riches story we see in the stock market or the movies we grew up with.
The TikTok-ification of everything means anyone can have viral content overnight in the slot machine that is social media, and the followers that you’ve spent years cultivating don’t win you extra views or extra reach. And yet brands and influencers alike still cling to follower count because the truth of the matter – the increasing randomness of reach – is just too hard to accept.
When you see work untether from reward in foundational systems like labor, finance, and media, you have to reorient your understanding of the market and the consumer. The future of business and culture is not merely about the value these systems unlock—it’s about the behaviors and beliefs they lock in.
We’re locking into a very different system that dissolves the old moorings of effort and reward, leaving us in a restless current of chance.
Chance and randomness are the dominant energies of our time.
It’s hard to make a narrative story out of that. There is no mythology available to us that will help make meaning out of the decoupling, although we’re seeing different factions of people try. Silicon Valley, faced with the imminent consequences of their own creation, is quickly revamping Christianity to be an absolving version of the prosperity gospel. The victimhood narrative that has characterized the far (over)reaches of politics, most recently America’s vengeful tariffs, may give people some small sense of purpose and understanding in a strange new world, but it will be insufficient.
What makes the decoupling so pervasive is the massive infrastructures that enforce it by default. Influencer culture, self-enhancement medicine, cheatware, min/maxing… the signs were coming for a while, but now we have legit, permanent systems at the heart of everyday life that force the decoupling on all of us.
The void will touch everything. How do we value an employee, a member of the community, a partner, a leader, a teacher, a political movement, an education, a lifestyle, a brand, a product, or an idea when we can no longer point to work and dedication as a reliable measure of shared value?
Where can we extract meaning when the singular measure a life well-lived no longer holds?
Some early signals suggest “we’re cooked” as my principal strategist Zach Lamb likes to jokingly say. We see darker versions of Christianity, politics, dating, tribalism and identity taking hold. Not because people are necessarily cruel, but because these versions are simply better adapted for this new world where beating (or cheating) the system is the only rational strategy.
But we’d be poor brand strategists and futurists if we accepted the next bad thing as our ultimate fate. The long trajectory of history has always pointed toward progress, social innovation, and most importantly, surprises in foresight that look like common sense in hindsight.
So what might those common sense surprises look like?
What we’re seeing now are early, clumsy attempts of a culture trying to reform itself, but there are also lighter versions of things coming into focus: people finding meaning outside of work, radical new forms of community building, psychedelic therapy, enlightened spirituality, and a redefinition of success.
When we can no longer value ourselves or each other by the “work” or the effort, we have to find other ways to decide who and what is valuable. In the short-term, there will be two concurrent tracks we see culture taking: worshipping chance or playing with meaning.
Worshipping chance is a natural extension of a system that has burned through its illusions of fairness. When hard work no longer guarantees reward, our default response is to elevate randomness itself, investing it with a near-spiritual authority. The hustle once revolved around effort, but now it’s about catching lightning in a bottle. The algorithm’s next wave or a stray viral moment can bestow wealth or influence more swiftly than years of honest grind, so chance becomes something to venerate. A chaotic deity in an otherwise disenchanted world.
In practice, this devotion to luck reveals itself everywhere from retail trading frenzies to viral overnight success stories. Instead of following predictable career ladders or carefully planned investments, people chase sudden gains, hoping to decode the next market upswing or social media glitch.
Brands, influencers, and even entire platforms amplify these tales of instant fortune, further fueling the belief that chance might be our last reliable path to success. When we glamorize this volatility, we risk normalizing the idea that pursuing (or even engineering) random breaks is the most rational option.
But worshipping chance also sets the stage for playing with meaning.
Once we recognize just how mercurial success can be, we can move beyond passive acceptance of the system’s randomness and begin actively reshaping our notions of value. There will be people who throw themselves headfirst into the glitch in the system and turn it into an art form. If everyone can cheat their way to mastery, wealth, or beauty, they will see it as a giant permission slip to create new ways of finding meaning.
When effort is no longer the golden path, we’re finally free to invent purpose that isn’t measured by sweat and grind. We can build cosmic parties, societies, religions where creativity is currency. We can remix our social rituals with absurd new rules. We can pursue weirdness like it’s sacred.
And some of that could really happen. Some of it is already happening in our homes, gathering places, and centers of worship.
If the old myth is gone, we are just as likely as not to write new ones so brilliant and so joyful, that they actually thrive in a system that precludes us from making work the pathway to meaning. When chance so often triumphs over sweat, the real opportunity lies in writing narratives that thrive precisely because they reject old rules, and in doing so, create surprising, life-affirming possibilities that might just become the new mythologies we live by.
For brands and their leaders, this decoupling has profound implications. If success can strike at random, then the old playbooks, where you simply celebrate hard work or exclusivity, might no longer resonate with consumers who feel the ground shifting under their feet.
When anyone can go viral, re-sculpt their body, or amass sudden wealth, it becomes harder to sell the myth that effort alone is what makes a product, lifestyle, or status truly valuable (which is how most products and aspirations are branded today).
Instead, you have to help people navigate this unpredictable landscape in a meaningful way. And the good news is that both worshipping chance and playing with meaning open the door for brands to build new kinds of trust and loyalty.
The obvious way is to acknowledge the randomness and empower consumers to experiment, take creative risks, and find joy in the unexpected. Lots of brands will lean into this chance-heavy side of the equation. It’s easier to feed into game mechanics, gambling experiences, and the overall sense of worshipping chance when it ensnares audiences into deeper usage. It can be as simple as a loot box or as sophisticated as an all-knowing slot machine algorithm.
But I think the far more exciting and lucrative path is for brands to play with meaning alongside their consumers.
There are the obvious ways, such as facilitating deeper forms of meaning-making through genuine community, playful engagement, or creative self expression. I haven’t seen any of these formats reliably solved so there’s plenty of room for brands to grow here alone.
But what if brands went further? What if we curate moments of shared wonder and purpose? What if we created joyful new norms around connection, family and belonging? Can you imagine a brand that makes people feel human again? Or makes them feel even more than human? The most exciting thing about all of this is that brands can finally, thankfully, build long term connections that go beyond the next viral spike because people are ready and waiting for it.
I firmly believe brands can help consumers rewrite the script, and transform a disorienting decoupling into an opportunity for collective reinvention.
There is an invisible but open need for a story that makes sense of this all. The decoupling may look like threads coming apart today, but culture always weaves itself back together. We can redefine what value looks like.
We can create new measures of experience and value that go well beyond the idea of work and reward, and help us measure our lives in more accurate ways.
Things have been getting weird lately. I’m not talking about “shock value weird” or “gross weird”. I’m talking about the kind of weirdness we feel when we’re forced to embrace contradictions, and contradictions are starting to show up everywhere.
Think off-grid influencers, breadwinning tradwives, crypto-bro environmentalists, and the voters that picked both AOC and Trump on the same ballot. But don’t get caught up in the moral discourse here.
Instead, pay attention to the contradictions that are being forced together. Try to feel for a moment what it means to reject society and have millions of followers on TikTok, or believe in democratic ideals and trust a republican leader to make them happen. More and more people are openly embodying conflicting truths, and if you ask them about it, they’ll tell you it’s freeing. It’s who they are.
Humans are messy and in an algorithmic world where two-dimensional authenticity has forced us into shallow labels and binary tribes, we’ve been ignoring the fact that in our most authentic state, humans are not easy to categorize at all.
Certainly not anymore, at least. Suddenly it’s impossible to describe who a typical feminist is, where a typical Republican is from, where to draw the line between a critic and a conspiracy theorist, or how to tell the difference between an entrepreneur and a blue collar worker. In our industry, people love to talk about how the algorithm has homogenized culture but they fail to see that what it’s really done is fragment identity.
This is what post-authenticity looks like. An open embrace of weird contradictions that make it impossible to draw generalizations.
What most people don’t understand is that what may look like a contradiction from one angle looks just as much like concordance from a different one. When AOC asked her constituents why they voted for both her and Trump, one voter said, “I feel like Trump and you are both real.”
Post-authenticity feels weird because we’ve willingly flattened ourselves and each other into tidy cultural boxes for so long that we’ve forgotten that people can have moderate views, vote for more than one party, redefine their self-interests and reject the need to explain themselves to everyone else. We forgot that people have always contained multitudes, and their multitudes are where they find meaning.
In the coming years, we will see more and more people publicly embody contradictions, and that will make it hard to categorize them in the algorithm of our minds. We will be forced to find beauty in the weirdness we’ve tried to optimize away. Merriam-Webster named authentic Word of the Year in 2023, but on the eve of 2025, it turns out we’ve been inauthentic this entire time.
A rough map of the cultural eras takes us from conformity to aspiration to authenticity to now post-authenticity, and the trending line that connects all of those things together is the journey inward.
We’re going from external validation to internal discovery, and that aligns with the broader trend of culture becoming increasingly introspective, personal, and self-reflective. Of course we’re still desperate for validation, but the rising tide of weirdness tells us that perhaps the cost of validation is becoming too high.
I think that’s a good thing. In fact, I think that’s a great thing because weird is an excellent wayfinder for brand strategists.
I gave a keynote address at TikTok a couple months ago about how to predict the future, and one of the things I talked about was how weird signals usually give us a glimpse into the future we can’t see yet. Every major cultural shift that changed our lives once started as a small anomaly in the system.
Arnold Schwarzenegger at Muscle Beach in the 1970s.
Muscle Beach was a small anomaly in the 1970s, and it was very weird. But it wasn’t weird because people were exercising (exercise was becoming more widely adopted at that time). It wasn’t weird because women were in bikinis. It wasn’t weird because it was a gym on the beach.
It was weird because men were flaunting their physiques.
Up until that point, vanity was considered a woman’s domain and men were meant to have purely intellectual pursuits. Seeing men obsess over their muscles and celebrate their bodies was so weird that Muscle Beach was met with a tremendous amount of public disdain.
Of course today bodybuilding is a massive industry, and men flaunting their bodies isn’t seen as vanity. It’s seen as self-respect, dignity and aspiration.
This story gives us a really important lesson about weird signals. Things that are weird for the sake of being weird do not matter. The weird that matters – the kind of weird that can help us see and create the future – are things that trespass our invisible boundaries and norms.
It’s usually the kind of weird you feel deeply in your body when you first encounter it. It can be good-weird or bad-weird, but either way you feel it in your bones. It’s a trespass you will feel within yourself before it registers in your brain because it’s triggering a deeper truth.
Like I said, weird is a great wayfinder. And now that our weirdness is escaping the algorithm, the signals are multiplying.
Mommunes (homes where single mothers live and raise children together) were in the news earlier this year and it made people feel all kinds of things. New forms of living arrangements are actually popping up everywhere throughout the world right now: eco-villages, inter-generational living, digital nomad co-housing and even the resurgence of traditional communes.
People think these things are weird because they take away autonomy, but if you interrogate their emotions you’ll find that people feel weird because there is a norm being challenged here.
For the first time ever in our culture, we are de-centering romantic relationships and instead centering friendship. Mommunes, especially, signal the fact that people are ready to build their lives and families outside of the norms of marriage.
Think about what that means for brands that play in relationships. What does it mean for parenting or community brands? If you want to create the future here, are you creating a future based on who we fall in love with, or instead based on who we choose to trust? Because it’s starting to look like who we fall in love with and who we trust aren’t always the same person anymore.
There was a time not so long ago where if you were a titan of industry and a billionaire, you would build huge monuments in the middle of the city that not only celebrated you, but also our collective progress. That’s why we have Rockefeller center, the Getty, and Carnegie Hall.
But our billionaires today aren’t building monuments in the middle of town. Instead they’re doing something much weirder – building small cities and apocalypse bunkers on private islands, away from the masses and solely for a select few.
What does that tell us about being wealthy? Is true wealth about building society or is it about exiting society? How does that affect what people aspire to? For brands that play in status, Is it a status symbol to be famous or is it a status symbol to hide?
If you pay attention to the right kind of weird, it will tell you where old values are crashing into new ones, and those new values are what you can build the future on top of. The most successful brands tapped into our new values before we even had the words to describe them, and they got an outsized return by betting on them early.
There was a time in Middle English when weird referred to someone who could control fate. In texts like Beowulf, weird is a central theme referring to the inevitable course of events. If you look, you’ll find myths and stories throughout the histories of different cultures that interpret weird the same way. We’ve always had an innate understanding that when things feel strange, they’re often premonitions of what is to come.
As we wrap up the year and think about what’s ahead, I invite you to reframe your understanding of what weird is.
Don’t run from it. Learn how to spot it and chase it.
Trust that even though things are about to get really weird and unfamiliar, you can use that to gain a better understanding of your user and your market. You can use those signals to create the future you want.
The world is still revealing itself.
P.S. I’ll be writing a report about this topic, with deeper insights, future signals and actionable takeaways for brands soon. Stay tuned.
I have a hot take on why Halloween is taking over more and more of our lives.
I think we’re using Halloween to explore our unprocessed grief as a culture.
Sales for the holiday are booming, Target added a whopping 1,300 Halloween SKUs this year, and the most Americans ever report they will be celebrating. It’s not a day or month anymore, Halloween is a whole season.
We want more Halloween.
Bigger and scarier, but also more all-consuming.
There’s been a surge in the popularity of immersive horror experiences and we’ve turned a children’s holiday into an adult escapade (adults now spend significantly more on Halloween for themselves).
Meanwhile, more and more people are seeking ways to find the pageantry in death, whether it’s in living funeral parties, death doulas or the death positivity movement. There’s been an explosion of #shadowwork, dark romantasy, and the overall rise of memento mori practices all at the same time.
Even the current rise of #witchtok has a longstanding precedent in people turning to the occult after periods of acute change (much like the acute change we have all experienced in recent years.)
America’s Halloween Era has arrived.
It’s a movement defined by our collective desire to be immersed in the dark, the morbid, and the macabre – and while consumerism doesn’t begin to adequately explain a movement with such emotional underpinnings, psychology possibly does.
This may be one of the ways we’re dealing with our grief for what has been lost over the past few years: loss of community, loss of safety and social trust, and even the loss of our previous identities.
We have lost so much and in so many ways, and a culture can only go so long without addressing its grief.
For many, the chaos and upheaval of the past few years didn’t leave time to properly process it all. The pandemic, shifting economy, social and political unrest, and constant uncertainty took us from one crisis to another, leaving us in a state of suspended mourning.
And so where does a culture like America’s go – a culture famously bereft of any formal rituals for embracing death and loss – when it needs to confront these feelings that have been building up for so long?
We go to a holiday like Halloween. A holiday that acts as a safe and creative space for turning grief into a form of ritualized expression.
That doesn’t mean we feel sad or shed tears on Halloween. It means, instead, that we’ve begun to use it as a sort of emotional release valve.
We can toy with the feelings that have haunted us without having to succumb to them.
We can relate to death without having to admit exactly what has been lost.
And maybe that’s as much as our weary culture can handle right now.
After all, it’s one of our only holidays that openly embraces themes of darkness and transformation, letting us confront difficult emotions in a palatable but meaningful way.
We can play to process, and that’s the perfect compromise for a public that is maybe too fatigued to handle their collective trauma head-on.
It’s death, but from a playful distance.
With such emotional burden in the air, it’s no wonder that Halloween has started to change the landscape of both our front lawns and our businesses. It has literally transformed the pattern of Home Depot’s foot traffic, and the once-small faction of Halloween superfans is now racing alongside the general public to get hot items before they sell out, usually months in advance of October 31st at places like Target, Pottery Barn, Bath Bath and Bodyworks, Crate & Barrel, Homegoods, JoAnn’s and numerous other retailers.
Even the Spirit Halloween store, once an eyesore in struggling retail centers, has become the welcome harbinger of spooky season.
Now I understand that some of this can be explained by the rise of cosplay, Halloween’s non-denominational appeal, and our general, growing urge to just celebrate more (all great points brought up by strategists I admire when I first posted this hot take on LinkedIn), but I don’t feel that these forms of American consumerism fully explain the magnitude of what’s happening.
We’re buying more of the holiday because we want to live more of it. Normal people around the country are in bitter feuds with their HOAs to keep their 12-foot Home Depot skeletons (a.k.a. Skellys) up all year long, dressing them up for Mardi Gras, Independence Day, Christmas and Back-To-School season.
For others, Halloween is a year-round aesthetic distinct from goth or emo. Halloween planning comes earlier every year and lawn decorations continue to get more gory and terrifying.
We want Halloween, along with all of its chills and thrills, to be a more integral part of our lives. We want to coexist with our haunting feelings and to draw out the terror. We’re seeking a deeper and darker experience not only out of Halloween, but also out of all of the death-related trends that are growing in step with it.
A nation robbed of its mourning now longs to dance with fear. We’ve wanted to face the darkness for a long time and when feelings like that are repressed, they don’t just go away. Instead they come out sideways – in weird, playful, thinly-veiled desires to feel something deeper.
And this is where brands should take note.
This new eagerness to play with the things that terrify us is whole new territory. This is not jumpscares and haunted houses. This is a vicarious release for our pent up distress. On some level, people aren’t really looking for Halloween. They’re looking for catharsis—a release for emotions they’re not able to process otherwise, because they haven’t been given the time or space to do it in.
You have to ask yourself if your brand creates the kinds of spaces people can feel deeply in. If people are looking for spaces where they can jolt their emotions and feel something more intense, are you creating those spaces for them?
It doesn’t have to be Halloween and it doesn’t have to be feelings of mourning, but it does have to be a special space where people can behave and feel differently.
When Ozempic was first becoming a household name last year, the public discourse around semaglutides took on a predictable pattern.
First there was concern about its safety, then skepticism of its effectiveness, and finally the conversation landed on the question of its morality. Was it immoral for obese people to “cheat” and use semaglutides to shed extra weight?
When every other practical concern was rebuffed, and even after offshoot brands like Zepbound were developed and released specifically for weight loss management instead of diabetes, the argument of morality only grew louder.
This is not an uncommon pattern for brands like Ozempic and their counterparts.
If you were paying attention you would have seen a similar pattern playing out in the public discourse around OpenAI, OnlyFans, Oatly, and smaller brands in emerging categories like female hormone replacement therapy, polyamory, end-of-life care, and baby formula.
One of the most interesting brand frontiers I see is companies tackling what I call “moral static”, and I recently wrote about it for Adweek.
We see moral static in categories where new technologies, inventions or ideas are forcing us to face our deeply held, sometimes deeply false, biases. When those biases are laid bare, we resort to an argument of morality.
Moral static isn’t genuine, nuanced moral discourse.
It’s the chaotic buzz of blunt moral objection with no real path to discussion or progress. When new ideas and innovations threaten peoples’ identities, they cling to one-size-fits-all moral arguments even when there is no logical argument left.
Instead of producing a clear conversation about how we can update our models of what is right and wrong, these categories produce static.
Food brands, which operate in a highly identity-driven category, see their fair share of moral static. Oatly faced initial pushback in its native Sweden with critics discounting their oat milk as nutritionally inferior to cow’s milk, and asserting the company’s sustainability promises were inflated.
Oatly easily dismissed or disproved those claims, but it wasn’t until dairy farmers and consumers pointed at Oatly’s slogan “Flush the milk” as attacking a Swedish way of life for both dairy farmers and consumers that Oatly’s narrative was finally complicated with moral static.
America’s own relationship with food is especially plagued by moral static.
Ten years ago, buzzy brands like Soylent and Huel were initially praised for their convenience and nutritional value, but eventually saw themselves in debates about the degradation of meal culture and America’s toxic relationship with food.
Today is no different. When the FDA opened public comments on how to officially define “natural foods”, consumers often invoked moral references to God, what God intended, or Mother Nature instead of more practical definitions that precluded additives or chemicals.
While discussions of morality and ethics are vitally important when culture is faced with any new technological frontier, moral static is different.
Kranzberg’s first law of technology says that ‘Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.’ People will always have biased reactions to new ideas, but today moral static is our lazy default. It’s the outrage in TikTok comments and Instagram clapback videos that only scares and confuses people, with no real intention of finding a new moral commons.
Morality is extremely difficult terrain for brands to navigate. Rather than doubling down on the moral question, it’s almost always better to deal with it through humor, irreverence or irony.
However for some brands, moral static is on the critical path to growth and the only way to go through it is to just go through it.
In cases like that, it’s important to remember that moral static places both the brand and the user at the center of a very difficult question: What is the right way to live?
That question can only be answered from the horizon of a new world, not the horizon of our old one, and the one thing brands do really well is build new worlds.
But there are rules to building a new world.
Brands have to be smart about how they support new moral beliefs, how they position themselves against common enemies, and the communities they nurture for their users.
In the business of strategy, you have to consume a lot of information. If you’re responsible for charting the course of a business or brand, then you’re responsible for understanding the world it lives within.
The most successful founders and investors are always the ones who are able to connect the dots before everyone else and cultivate high-conviction predictions of where the future is headed.
In large part, the success of a business is heavily informed by the information diets of its leaders.
In the English language, we think of ideas and information as food – “half-baked ideas,” “digesting information,” “food for thought” – so the metaphor of an “information diet” gives us a lot of intuitive jumping-off points to understand this world better.
When it comes to information, there’s little gap between what we consume and our perception of the world. When people talk about the world ending or techno-utopia, what they’re really telling you is what content they’ve been consuming and what corner of the algorithm they inhabit.
If physical diet is to blame for many of the physical health issues we face today, then our information diet should also be considered a contributor to our mental health issues. Research conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic found the news we seek and consume plays a powerful role in shaping our moods and can even contribute to conditions like depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. And there is an increasingly broad consensus of studies pointing to the stronghold social media consumption can have on our overall well-being.
This brings us to the question I’ve been considering: what is the ideal information diet? And how can strategists in particular develop a well-balanced palette?
The first observation is that information diets are to strategists what food diets are to weightlifters. Our consumption behaviors are highly atypical and are designed with a very specific goal in mind.
So, this isn’t just a question of who you should follow. It’s about your relationship with the content you consume and cultivating a structured approach to the information you invest your time in.
The Nutrition Facts of Information
In food, each nutrient is linked to a concrete physiological system in the body. We can similarly interpret the nutrition facts of information by looking at the systems that regulate our emotions and perceptions – our hormones.
Of all the hormones in the body, there are five that seem most responsible for our conscious perception of the world. These are our “macronutrients” – dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, cortisol and adrenaline. (For simplicity I’m combining the effects of epinephrine and norepinephrine under adrenaline.)
Putting this into practice, here’s how we might better approach a more balanced information diet based on each of these hormones.
Understanding Our Diets
Laying out the information we consume this way starts to offer valuable insight.
We all generally have a good intuition of what “unhealthy” content looks like – attention-grabbing, sensational, intense – and we know all too well that too much of it can affect us negatively. What we don’t see as obviously is the harm from low-oxytocin content – think themes of distrust and discord or skepticism and conflict. This type of content is just as pervasive, but it affects us more subtly.
Unlike a spike in adrenaline or cortisol that is easy to observe, low-oxytocin content gradually adjusts our expectations of the kind of world we live in. Given enough engagement, it changes how we view our neighborhoods and our neighbors. It encourages us to be disconnected skeptics.
Sticking with low-oxytocin content also puts us at risk of missing the diverse nutrients from other types of information. The sort of valuable insights that make for successful strategists and leaders are not found where there is skepticism and conflict but where connection and trust are forming. The best insights come from finding what people are running towards, not away from. Those places show us where opportunities can be found.
People talk about how everyone is running away from alcohol, but more importantly, they’re running towards more meaningful gatherings and connections.
People talk about how everyone is running away from buying houses, but more importantly, they’re running towards a more present-focused mindset around goals, spending and experiences. A lot of people are choosing to be “forever-renters” not because they can’t afford a home but as an intentional response to an increasingly uncertain future.
In both cases, there’s far more noise in the negative story but far more value in understanding the positive one.
Focusing your diet on “healthy” information won’t just improve your mental state, it’ll expose you to much higher signal-to-noise content. Content that actually represents reality and progress, not just perceptions of doom and gloom.
When people are inciting fear, dread, or pessimism, they’re often looking to extract value from us. When people are optimistic and actively connected, it’s usually a constructive environment that is far more likely to add value. This is why it’s the optimists who make the money at the end of the day.
If you want to make this framework actionable, go through your typical information sources for 10 minutes and simply observe what hormones the content is designed to trigger. Remove the bottom 20-30% of content sources or creators from your channels, then make a list of the top five creators or sources of high-quality, healthy content. From now on, make a point to start any information consumption with one of those five.
The Food Groups of Information
Information nutrition is only one part of the picture. The genres of content we consume matter just as much, if not more. All information serves a function, so making sure the information we consume is serving us instead of using us is crucial.
So, how should we think about the types of information we consume? At the risk of significantly over-using this metaphor, the food pyramid offers us a helpful framework to structure our thinking.
We can break all information into five distinct functions: to inform, to entertain, to teach, to inspire or to connect. Broadly, this encompasses the full extent of the information landscape.
The information ‘food pyramid’:
For most of us, social media constitutes the majority of time spent consuming information, and depending on how you’ve trained your algorithm, you’ll get your own custom blend of these ingredients (likely with a heavy emphasis on entertainment). The one thing that social media does not provide us with, ironically, is meaningful connection.
Social media doesn’t let us actually absorb the information we consume. We’re blasted with low-context content and given no time to reflect on what we’ve just consumed before the next video starts to play. Functionally, it’s the same as junk food – we absorb the message straight into our psyche without vetting it, contextualizing it or reflecting on what we just consumed.
I recently watched a TikTok summarizing an article that was summarizing a documentary that was summarizing a trial. While there was some insight in there, it’s worth pausing and asking if this information is strategically valuable to me or if it is just interesting. Am I actually educating myself or just entertaining myself? Is this rare information or insight that will help me cultivate a deeper, valuable understanding or is it actually “junk food” for my brain? I didn’t get the chance to ask myself these questions in the moment, I just scrolled to the next video – and therein lies the truth.
What we ought to do instead is chew our food. Take the time to process the information, ideas and concepts on our screens. Would we be better served to consume less but process it more? I think so.
You might think a healthy information diet – especially one for a business leader or strategist – would have information at the bottom of the pyramid, but you’d be missing a crucial insight. Connection is how we process information.
When there’s a big event in the media, it’s our collective discussion of it that makes it make sense to us. If you want to really understand a category, you need to talk to the people in it – it’s only then that the truth will reveal itself.
Musician Brian Eno coined the term “scenius” to describe the collective intelligence of a whole community. Often, the geniuses we look back on in history were one part of a whole collective of people, it’s just that history is better at remembering names than groups. This cannot be emphasized enough: we’ve forgotten what made our heroes so great, which was the collective.
The point here is that, as a society, we seem to dramatically undervalue the importance of human connection as a way of understanding the world, much less centering it in our information diets.
As a strategist, if you want rare insight, you need to have access to rare perspectives and those come from people, not publications or posts on social media.
In business, a heuristic I’ve found to be very consistent is that you can measure the quality of a business’s leadership by how deeply they understand the people they serve and how much intuition they’ve built up from direct engagement with their audience. In the book Unreasonable Hospitality, Will Guidara talks about the all-too-common problem in organizations where the leadership has all of the authority but none of the insight and their staff have all of the insight but none of the authority.
The short of it is that when we think about information diets we might fixate on the quantity of information but ignore the quality and the processing of it. That’s like only looking at calories to determine if a diet is healthy. We need to have a higher-fidelity picture of the information we consume – our entire perception of reality relies upon it.
If you want to build deep insights, you need to cultivate deep sources. If you want to have original thoughts, you need to spend time thinking. It sounds obvious, but many of us fail to make time for anything other than just consuming content when we’re trying to get our information fill.
This thinking about developing an information diet was the driving inspiration behind building Exposure Therapy, Concept Bureau’s private community for strategic minds. Launching this community was an experiment to develop our own scenius and build a culture of connection around the information we consume.
Connecting with more than 60 other strategists, executives and founders from around the world – each tapped into unique facets of culture and the market – has created an incredible forum to go deeper and expand my radar of insights. It’s also been a fantastic opportunity to speak directly with a breadth of experts I would have never otherwise had the opportunity to connect with, from top-ranked pokers to conflict negotiators and financial therapists.
To become a genius, you have to build your scenius.
While launching or joining a community like Exposure Therapy is one example of an actionable application of this framework, you can also start small. Take 30 minutes every day to journal on an idea and explore its repercussions or deeper considerations. Then, go share those reflections with someone. If you don’t have someone to have that conversation with, spend 30 minutes instead reaching out to people who might be interested. This is the real practice of “digesting” our information.
Dieting Your Information
An idea I’ve been contemplating a lot recently is the virtue of ignorance. We know that being ignorant of everything is bad, but the opposite is true, too. To be hyper-aware of everything is terrible for our mental health, unnecessary and also impossible. So, it’s safe to admit to ourselves that some level of ignorance is good for our information diets. The question is: how much?
The law of diminishing returns is a helpful guide here. For every hour I educate myself on a given topic I’m learning fewer new things. During the first hour I spend understanding game theory or Bronze Age history I’m exposed to tons of new ideas, but during the 10th or 100th hour I’m learning far less. Thinking this way, there are two types of knowledge: the breadth of our awareness and the depth of our awareness within each topic.
The challenge as a strategist or leader is that you never truly know where valuable insights come from. Our tangents, side quests or personal passions often lead to the most influential ideas.
When you look at our most influential leaders, they all have one thing in common: a “T-shaped” knowledge graph. They’re in the top few percentile in terms of depth of knowledge in a certain field, but they also have a much broader awareness of things in the world than most.
If the value of insights is proportional to their rarity then being in the top 5% of depth in a specific field and the top 5% in breadth of awareness means you’re maximizing your surface area of valuable insights.
For most, our information diets are closer to resembling a square – we know an average amount of things about an average number of topics. We’re closer to 50% in the breadth and depth of what we consume. The danger in this information diet is that we’ll never see what others don’t because we’re simply not looking in places that others aren’t.
Building a T-shaped knowledge graph means aggressively diversifying your information sources, spreading out wider to seemingly unrelated areas and capturing the advantage of being at the beginning of the diminishing returns curve where you’re constantly exposed to new ideas. It also means being selectively ignorant about certain things. You have to critically evaluate what you consume and choose to place novelty over familiarity. In the few areas you don’t want to be ignorant about, go all the way in by reading lesser-known books, talking to the experts and cultivating your own original thinking through reflections and conversations.
This is what curiosity looks like – making yourself at home in novelty and constantly seeking new connections. Yes, it comes at the tradeoff of depth in other areas, but the leverage gained by not going too deep in depreciating returns means the amount of extra exposure you get is well worth the cost.
The ability to recontextualize old ideas in new ways is the magic of coupling diversity and depth in an information diet. Think of Steve Jobs and how his interest in calligraphy went on to be deeply influential in the philosophy of Apple, a perfect example of how taking mental models and learnings from seemingly unrelated disciplines can unlock new insights. After all, that is pretty much the definition of innovation.
Putting It Into Practice
Building a high-performance information diet requires more effort than your physical diet. It means being mindful of how the information you consume affects you, focusing on connection and reflection over just consumption and prioritizing the diversity and rarity of where your insights come from. Do this and you’ll gain a whole new vantage point on the world.
While I’ve provided you with some actionable steps to begin developing your unique diet, I’ll leave you with one last appeal to find a community that can help you identify and meet your nutritional needs. Make a deliberate practice of connecting with individuals and building collective wisdom. After all, food is best enjoyed in good company.
University of Chicago Philosophy Professor, @agnescollard, on X on 2/18/2024
It doesn’t matter if you believe them. The narrative has the power to shape reality, and major brands are beginning to take notice and to worry. In this Jim Beam ad, the proverbial Sweet Caroline is being belted out in a now-fleetingly-rare moment of brotherly love. Jim Beam is imploring us to get on down to the bar, commune with our brethren and have a bourbon while we’re at it. Imagine receiving this message from a brand ten years ago. You can’t.
Jim Beam’s “People Are Good For You,” 2023
This is the social situation AI is galloping into right now. Our fragile, introverted society is about to be given the Godlike power of world creation. Current AI technology allows us to generate anything we want, personalized and on-demand: newscasts, games, porn, friends, romantic partners, video, the dead – entire worlds.
Soon we’ll be consuming it all, ensconced in the safety of our Vision Pros. Some are already arguing that Open AI’s Sora proves we’re living in a simulation. Whether we’re in base reality or not, we’re all about to become simulators, lording courtly over our personal kingdoms. Your tamagotchi was a tchotchke of simpler times: just the start.
You now have a profound, consequential choice to make: Where will you call home? You can choose the real world, with its highs, and, increasingly, its lows, or you can choose an immersive, AI-powered world of your own creation.
What’s this all going to mean for you? For brands? For society? For our sacred institutions?
In order to reconcile these realities, we have to center the emotional experience they each provide. What does it feel like to live in a society that’s coming apart? What does it feel like to live in a digitally simulated world of your own making? How does each world satisfy (or not) our core human needs for belonging, safety and self-actualization?
The Downsides of Reality Fit – Hand in Glove – With the Upsides of AI
What’s largely missing from both the “AI will radically alter society” discourse (positive or negative) and the “what happened to society” discourse is any attempt at reconciliation. AI is entering our society – this one – and that matters. It’s not coming to us in a vacuum.
Two worlds walk into a bar because “people are good” for you:
It’s not difficult to see which of these is preferable. What’s striking is just how much the emotional experience of AI abets the existing real world trends of isolation, inversion, risk-aversion and societal exit. The popularity of AI worlds is poised to explode.
In 2021, Scientific American reported a finding that went criminally under-discussed: our definitions of personal space have dramatically expanded in both physical and in virtual spaces. We now claim a whopping 4.1 feet of personal space around our bodies, on average, which is up from 2.6 feet before the pandemic.
Similarly, drive through traffic at fast food restaurants is booming, the New York Times reports, such that many chains are considering closing the dining room all together. If you go to a given fast food restaurant in any city in America today, you’re likely to find people dining in their car.
What’s emerged is a new cultural attitude towards risk. Sociologists call this the culture of fear. The shell we’re placing around ourselves has gotten bigger, literally. New research has shown that Gen Z is the most risk-averse generation in history.
Teens are growing up anxious and depressed because their phones have become the medium of their reality. They don’t hang out, have sex, drive, drink or learn about themselves and each other through a healthy flirtation with risk.
The cultural analyst Freya India has recently written an excellent piece on how risk-aversion and the culture of fear affects romance. She convincingly argues that “the most dangerous life is one that demands nothing of you.”
“It’s tragic, all of this. Tragic because it’s putting us on a trajectory to miss out on what’s actually meaningful. There’s no love without vulnerability. There’s no life without fear. And you will no doubt derail romance if you are too risk-averse … We blunt romance and passion with this constant calculation of risk, this paranoid scanning for threats, and by holding back to avoid being hurt. We encourage each other to be emotionally absent, unfazed, uncaring. We even call it empowerment! It’s not. It’s neuroticism. I think we are a generation absolutely terrified of getting hurt and doing all we can to avoid it.”
Our real world culture of risk-aversion is about to collide with the most powerful, emotionally seductive technology the world has ever known. Many are already opting out of reality. These same people will likely choose to inhabit digital worlds that eliminate risk. An AI partner, for instance, will never disappoint you or hurt you. You are totally and completely safe. Replika, the foremost AI companion brand, promises users that their AI is “always on your side.”
In contrast, life in the real world is incredibly challenging. It’s hurtful. It breaks your heart. You can’t design it or control it. You take your lumps and you learn. You get exposed to challenging situations and challenging people. To difference. To risk.
The ability to customize, conjure and control our experience with AI is an incredible power. Throughout human history we’ve been at the mercy of God, never Gods ourselves. Spending time in self-created worlds and designed relationships is a peak experience of personal agency that does not exist in the emotional reality of day-to-day life.
“The Future is Here, It’s Just Not Evenly Distributed”
We primarily spend our time in three areas: with our partners, with our families and with our entertainments. How might things play out in these three core areas? What can we know now? What will it feel like for those early citizens of AI worlds?
AI Partnerships
Imagine: It’s 2030 and a friend of yours is in a loving and emotionally fulfilling relationship with an AI. Your friend has designed their partner to completely satisfy their physical and emotional requirements. They spend time together in VR every night, and your friend wears a headset in their apartment. Your friend routinely generates high-fidelity video dates for the two of them. When they have sex, your friend uses sex-technology that is synced with the video they generated – whatever they want in the moment. Your friend’s mirror neurons do not know the difference. At the level of brain chemistry, your friend is experiencing reality.
Technology is advancing rapidly and soon this will be much easier and more common. Sora and Apple Vision Pro will enable us to generate very realistic scenes with our AI companions and to consume them in augmented reality. “Sextech” for simulated romance is already a 37 billion dollar industry and growing. Take a look at what Replika – just one company – is working on:
Early returns are overwhelmingly positive, proving that human beings are capable of developing intense emotional bonds with artificial companions. Below is the response of Replika users after the Italian government cracked down on the company over personal data sharing, changing the way Replikas interact with humans:
Right now men are the primary consumers of AI partners, and this is likely to hold in the near future, but there are signs that women are getting in on the act, too. Women in China say AI boyfriends are better at talking to them than real men.
For now, though, let’s talk about men. Young people have always been the earliest adopters of technology. So, if you think about the dating life course, let’s call it 14 through 74, it’s reasonable to expect that teenage boys and men will dip in and out of AI relationships over the course of their lives. And it’s likely that teenage boys will start with AI partners. Again, AI’s are always available and “always on your side.”
Will this help involuntarily celebate men become less hateful? Will this turn more men into unmarriable men? Will this hurt women in real life? What does an AI experience of complete and total emotional acquiescence mean for real world relationships? I’m not here to pass judgment (there are plenty of good pieces where you can find that), merely to assert that a new world is emerging with new norms we’ve yet to figure out.
AI and Family Life
Imagine: Your son has daily interactions with an AI that is a mentor, friend, therapist and tutor – all at once. This AI is your son’s go to “person” for any need he has. The AI is trained on all of the world’s knowledge of positive psychology, and it models emotional control for your son in their interactions. You no longer need to assist him with homework. That’s now his AI’s job. At first you were skeptical about this relationship, but since he began talking with his companion, you notice a newfound maturity, and he’s starting to thrive at school.
Our Concept Bureau Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer Jean-Louis Rawlence strongly believes that in ten years, one of the three most important relationships in a child’s life will be with an AI. We do not have a model for what this relationship is in our current society. What do you call a mentor, tutor, therapist and friend? What is that, actually? What are its boundaries? What’s healthy and unhealthy about a relationship like this?
Children will naturally develop strong emotional attachments to their AI helpers. Early experience with AIs who are operating in this capacity will quickly normalize this type of relationship, likely within a generation, paving the way for still more AI-human romantic relationships in the teenage and adult years.
Fascinatingly, these AIs will share our children’s experiences. As children grow and maintain these relationships over the span of years, a repertoire of shared experience develops between the two, which will make these relationships incredibly difficult – nay, down right painful – to cast off. Life has a habit of always recommending a person be in your corner, after all.
When these children grow up and start dating each other in the real world, their long-time AI companions will likely come into their relationships with them in some capacity. Two will become four, and managing this tension will be a new relationship imperative.
The extent parents allow children to engage with AIs is a choice families will face in the near future, and there will be social pressure. Sociologist Allison Pugh has shown, in her book Longing and Belonging: Parents, Children and Consumer Culture, that parents readily go into debt to buy consumer goods and electronics for their children because they function as social passports, tickets of entry into peer groups. So what will you do when all of your child’s friends have these companions, and they ask you for one, too? Not to mention the very real fear that not having one of these helpers may put your child at risk of falling behind others in the classroom.
Another choice families will face is how much they will continue to share the same reality in the home. When watching videos of Apple’s new Vision Pro in action, you quickly realize that it represents world choice. Imagine your partner is all about it, and they create a personal virtual layer in your home. They pin relevant windows, tasks and applications in space all over your home. They start spending more time with a headset on. In order to keep up, you have to do the same. This is a choice, again: What world are we, as a family, primarily going to live in? Will you make the same choice as your children?
With a longer horizon, it gets even more interesting. Researchers at NYU successfully trained a multimodal AI system through the eyes and ears of a single child, using headcam video recordings from when the child was six months through their second birthday.
This leap enables AI systems to learn, grow and develop alongside a child, trained on every facet of their lived experience. Effectively, by doing this on a larger scale, we’d be cloning ourselves as AIs. There is no material difference between you and an AI that has been trained on your lived experience of reality. Whoa.
AI and Entertainment
Imagine, as web video producer and podcaster Marques Brownlee posed on X: “A theoretical VR headset that could fully trick all of your senses with perfect fidelity… You put the headset on and see the highest resolution perfect visual of the expansive Grand Canyon or some beautiful natural wonder in front of you
If you could see perfect visuals and hear the birds chirping and feel the wind on your face and smell the grass feel the warm sun on the back of your neck and every sense is fully covered to the point where your brain is basically tricked into believing you’re ACTUALLY looking at the Grand Canyon…
When you take the headset off… would you still want to go to the Grand Canyon?”
Survivors of near-death experiences report that when “beyond,” they observe no distinction between their inner and outer reality because they can change their surrounding environment just by thinking about it.
This is an intentional metaphor on my part. Our newfound ability is miraculous. If you can think it, you can now create it. In the near future, we will all be able to generate personal versions of reality with just our thoughts.
The floodgates of world creation have opened. As I referenced above, current technology enables us to generate newscasts on the topics we want with AI newscasters, gaming worlds for ourselves and others, video content of literally anything, high-fidelity facsimiles of our deceased loved ones, personal pornography, many-to-many AI bot simulations and helpful relationships of all varieties
Right now these experiences mostly exist in 2D, but soon they will take the leap into 3D, consumable in augmented reality headsets powered by spatial computing, making them much, much realer. We will become both Gods and experiencers, creators who walk among their creations.
What’s so seductive about it all is that it gives us the ability to make our fantasies reality by bending the world to our will. Anywhere on the planet you want to “go,” you can. Any experience you’ve daydreamed about having, it’s yours. Any Comic-Con-esque world you’d rather be living in, the real estate is free.
The knock-on implications of this are almost too vast to comprehend. They will disrupt nearly every industry in the long run. Prolific filmmaker Tyler Perry was so freaked out by Sora that he canceled his 800 million dollar plans to expand his Atlanta production studio.
It’s not just Hollywood, any real world form of entertainment is about to face existential competition: travel, live music, sporting events, you name it. Digital inhabitants are going to find digital solutions that enable them to sidestep the real-world challenges these forms of entertainment present.
The scale of “society” is shrinking again. We’ve gone from all of us, to some of us, and now, to me. We’re on the precipice of a true multiverse within the multiverse.
Branding Between Worlds
What’s a brand to do? When we’re caught between worlds, the opportunity for brands is to help us feel comfortable in either one; to move us from the liminal space to a more full and unabashed inhabitance on either side.
Our many-worlds future hasn’t fully arrived yet, but the good news for brands is that we can already anticipate the consumer needs that will emerge, or become more salient, in the future. On the side of old-fashioned reality, that means helping people get more out of life and to experience reality more richly, and on the digital side, that means reducing shame and lowering barriers to entry.
Sure, we all like to dunk on the zoomers who “invent” the classics when they put their phones down – the “silent walking” TikTok trend from last year is the probably the greatest offender – but taken seriously, these inventions betray real desire for a less mediated experience of reality.
Value-added connection will require brands to get deeper, and there’s an exciting emotional roadmap emerging: awe. Awe is on the cutting edge of emotion research today. Experiencing it has been shown to have tremendous benefits for overall wellbeing and happiness, but most of us live in an awe desert.
Awe used to be a daily occurrence. Humanity spent most of its history literally, awestruck by the awesome forces of nature. Just imagine going about your day 60,000 years ago and experiencing a spontaneous total solar eclipse without warning. You’d tremble in fear and bow in reverence. The roots of humanity’s religious impulse most likely arise from a wellspring of awe.
As I’ve previously observed, there is already a loud desire in our culture to experience more awe and wonder in daily life, to re-enchant a disenchanted world. This unmet need is only going to become more glaring as we move further into digital worlds.
For Keltner, there are reliable ways we can bring more awe into our lives. He recommends the obvious things like mindfulness, slowing down, paying attention and truly noticing the world around you, which is of course the foundation of many spiritual traditions. Keltner himself goes on routine “awe walks” for this purpose. Sublimity and danger is another obvious one, which means overcoming challenges and being in the presence of forces greater than yourself.
This is all clear terrain for outdoor brands, but what’s most revelatory about Keltner’s research is that our greatest and most reliable source of awe comes from observing the “moral beauty” of others. When we witness the simple goodness of others – not even the heroism of others – we feel awe. We become happier and more likely to pass on goodness ourselves.
For too long, culture has elevated what David Brooks calls “resume virtues” over “eulogy virtues.” Resume virtues are those most suited to success in markets, like our work ethic, professional achievements and our intellect, but these are not the things mentioned in our eulogies. Virtues such as humility, empathy and compassion are what we get remembered for.
Keltner’s research on awe shows that it’s time for the eulogy virtues to take center stage, which is exciting because what brand can’t surface the goodness of their users? Every brand is capable of making us feel good about each other, something we’ll sorely need in a fractured, many-worlds future.
Take Us to Extremes
As the cost-benefit analysis of engaging in real life changes, as our posture towards reality shifts from default to opt-in, what is reality’s new “job to be done”? What will people want out of their rarified forays into collectivity?
Reality remains unparalleled in its ability to push us to the edge of our experiential possibilities, and consumers will reward the brands that give them permission to go there. This is a sharp pivot away from the saccharine, share-worthy experiences of an earlier era that optimized for photo quality at the expense of actual emotional enjoyment.
The middle – the dreaded zone of neutrality – has always been a danger zone for brands, and we can expect the pressure to ratchet up. Expected, normal and typical are all positions that are poised to become increasingly risky for brands to inhabit in the near future.
It’s likely that consumers don’t want to leave reality. It’s just that reality is letting us down, not having kept pace with the internal changes we’ve all been undergoing in the wake of a pandemic that left an indelible mark on our collective psyche.
Take Fude Experience, for example. Fude is a gathering of strangers in the nude for dinner and conversation. Fude describes itself as a “liberating space that celebrates our most pure selves through soul-nourishing food, art, nudity, and self-love.”
Experiences like these are clearly touching a nerve right now. If rubbing elbows – literally – while dining naked isn’t your thing, rest assured because an exciting crop of startups are popping up to build new social infrastructure to combat our ballooning feelings of alienation.
According to French polymath and psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, we all feel a vague sense of lack in our being, and we don’t know where it came from. We spend our entire lives trying to fill it, though for Lacan, we can never succeed. Try as we might, our relationship with lack is asymptotic. We can only approach it but never truly fill it.
This nagging feeling of lack is what many brands are in the business of today, whether they realize it or not, and the brands of tomorrow will be increasingly called upon to address it.
The time is now for brands to get weird, to take chances and be anything but neutral. The winning brands of tomorrow will be the ones that recognize our growing desire to live in extremist.
This reflects a collective consciousness raising of just how taken in we’ve become by our phone-based existence. It isn’t a new idea but knowledge of the problem is now much broader.
We’re living in what’s been called “dopamine culture,” most recently by the cultural critic Ted Gioia. For Gioia, the business model of tech platforms is addiction. In the past, gambling, alcohol and cigarettes were our primary addictive businesses, and they were easily sequestered and regulated. Now, addiction as a business model comes in many forms, mostly dressed up in banal clothing.
The problem will only become more pernicious as we move from phones to the more enticing worlds on offer with spatial computing and AI. Consumers will increasingly be looking for slowness, silence, boredom, deliberateness and greater intentionality in their lives as a countervailing energy.
This presents an opportunity for brands to build more ritual into their brand experiences. Rituals provide space for pauses to punctuate our daily rhythms. Pauses create necessary distance to let experience in and help you be in the moment. We already are struggling to stay “grounded” today, and rituals help us do that.
An example of a brand that’s built around ritual is Lapse, which styles itself as the “anti-Instagram.” The point of Lapse is to share photos with only your closest friends. The app functions like a point and shoot camera, but, critically, you can’t see your photos until several hours later after they have “developed.”
By putting friction into the user experience of social media, Lapse is standing out. But any brand is capable of leveraging friction and ritual in their user experience. Your future users will thank you for any gift of pausing you give them.
Give Us Permission to Have Positive Visions of the Future
Have you noticed the lack of optimistic visions for our social future lately? It’s true. Concept Bureau Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer Jasmine Bina writes that brands are “stuck in an eternal now.” Brands most often talk to the individual, not the collective, and they are oriented towards the present, not the future. They speak to your present, rarely our future.
In polite conversation these days, if you advance a positive vision for the future you’re likely to have your sanity and/or your intelligence questioned. This is a natural result of the negativity economy that ordains in the media and social media.
It’s much easier to find negative takes on human relationships with AIs than it is to find positive ones; at best, the broader culture seems to be ambivalent about it.
Still, AI prognosticators are largely criticized. At SXSW 2024 the crowd booed a sizzle reel of people promising a beautiful AI future. While the rancor is there, and for good reason, the bottom line is that we don’t ultimately know what will happen. The future is always different from what we think it will be.
There are many people who think the future will be incredible and are ready to live in that world right now, breaking from the reality others call home. The techno-optimists among us will badly need new narratives and brands have an opportunity to furnish them, changing culture. We will surely look to brands to help us feel like the early adopters some of us badly want to be.
Who is going to do this but brands? The government is certainly not going to solve this problem, nor will citizens on their own. Edelman’s trust barometer has shown, year after year, that an increasing number of Americans view business as responsible for solving our social problems. Brands have to heed this call and tighten a loose culture. The future, so uncertain, needs to be defined.
The best brands will solve the emerging many worlds tensions and give us permission to be the people we long to be. They will see our unmet needs and advocate for them, conditioning the rest of the market in the process. Those among us who will choose to be initial explorers of AI worlds, relationships and friendships will need permission.
Everyone Will Need to Come Home
Picture the universe expanding – galactic centers of heat, light and gravity that are constantly spreading out, leaving vast empty spaces between them. As we think about what it means to be caught between worlds, this is what it’s like: clustering with vast emptiness in between. It’s now vitally important for everyone to find their strong-tie community, their galactic center of gravity. Above all, this is the job to be done in the next era of branding: helping us come home to each other. Everyone will need to feel comfortable with the fellow citizens of their chosen world. Our most cherished values lurk beneath the surface of our world choice. World choice is, at bottom, the loudest possible assertion of what we find meaningful in life.
We’ll need help moving more fully into whatever world we want to live in. And we’ll need help figuring out the norms and rules of these worlds, managing the friction that naturally occurs between them. Brands must do this for us.
Our rules are built for a shared world that no longer exists. This has been a eulogy for that world. But like any good eulogy, it should not leave you despairing.
What is your deepest, most interesting secret? You don’t have to tell me, but maybe you’ve told ChatGPT about it or confided in Pi AI. Or perhaps you’ve sought advice on meal choices or entertainment options or asked for brunch outfit suggestions (🙋🏽♀️) from another AI offering. It’s not about what you asked or shared; what truly matters is the leap of faith you took. By interacting with AI, you embraced something recently unfamiliar to the masses, integrating it seamlessly into your everyday existence for tasks both trivial and transformative – and therein lies the user experience shift.
AI is not just reshaping brands; it’s redrawing the map of how consumers interact with brands and the world entirely. This revolution is ushering in a new era of user-brand interaction, where AI’s capabilities enable people to craft unique experiences and expectations from the brands they engage with. The evidence is clear, from Forbes highlighting AI’s multi-faceted impact on future consumer behavior to the New York Times discussing the dawn of personalized AI agents. This transition encompasses more than just technological advancements; it signifies a fundamental shift in user behavior and, subsequently, the trajectory of user research.
As brands navigate this new territory, the traditional methodologies of user research and insights gathering simply won’t work anymore. It’s no longer enough to predict user behavior; brands must now, more than ever, adapt to the fluid expectations of their audience by focusing on underlying consumer emotions and worldviews. The dynamic nature of AI-driven consumer interactions demands a fresh approach to understanding and engaging with the market and your audience.
These new rules for user insights aren’t just guidelines; they’re essential for moving your brand forward, given how AI is already conditioning users.
1. No more conclusions.
In the traditional model of user research, the objective often culminates in a definitive conclusion about user behavior, preferences, or trends. But AI’s ability to offer personalized experiences at scale means that consumer preferences and needs are no longer static; they evolve in real time based on new data inputs and interactions. The dynamic nature of AI encourages users to seek new information and experiences with that information continuously. In an era defined by AI-driven dynamism, the journey matters more than the destination.
This fluidity demands user research that prioritizes ongoing exploration. What is most important to understand is if the emotional bedrock underlying these wants and needs is also shifting or if it is remaining static.
Evidence of this change can be seen in how brands like Netflix and Amazon use AI to continuously adapt their recommendations, encouraging users to explore new content rather than settling on a fixed set of preferences. This approach enhances user engagement and provides these companies with a wealth of data on evolving consumer tastes and behaviors. Exploration allows for a deeper understanding of the emotions and motivations driving consumer behavior beyond mere surface-level desires. Looking at the patterns in user exploration over singular conclusions unearths more resonant user insights.
2. Intuition is a stronger signal than reason.
In TikTok videos and on other social media platforms, users are sharing how AI tools have helped them make choices more confidently and swiftly. What we’re seeing here is a broader trend towards valuing intuitive responses, which can provide deeper insights into user preferences and decision-making processes.
When people use AI chatbots like ChatGPT, they receive fast, condensed answers, allowing them to quickly hone in on the information they need in a highly iterative way. This teaches users to make rapid decisions based on brief hits of information rather than needing the time to source and synthesize their own findings.
AI is training the user to ask questions quickly and directly and then move on. It’s a very different process that will ultimately hone users’ gut or intuitive thinking. This is a huge shift that changes everything we know about formulating research questions and a resonant overall brand strategy.
Brands must adapt their research methodologies to capture gut reactions, employing interviews, surveys and other research vehicles that capture instinctual responses over reasoned ones. That means asking questions that are both clear and specific but also open-ended enough to allow for personalization. This approach not only aligns with the changing user behavior but also offers a more direct window into less filtered preferences and biases of your audience.
TikToker @the.rachel.woods discussing how AI can help people make better decisions.
3. Embrace the raw, unfiltered essence of your user.
In an era where AI technologies foster personalization at an unprecedented scale, the capacity to understand and celebrate users’ real, multifaceted natures becomes critical. AI won’t judge or make demands of who they want the user to be, so why should your brand? Too often, when working with brands at Concept Bureau, we find a common user worldview that brands need to speak to, but for one reason or another, this does not line up with how brands view their users. User research must allow for the multitudes we all contain.
The more users interact with AI, the more they are conditioned to expect relationships with no judgments or expectations put on them. I know people who have confided in AI about relationships, parenting, mental health challenges and career progression, sometimes using AI to help launch conversations in their real life that have made a positive difference. In each of these scenarios, AI was an adaptive, nonjudgmental conversation partner to help work out all of the kinks. This sets a new standard for how brands should approach their audience and user research: with openness, flexibility and a genuine appreciation for individuality.
Applying this principle requires a departure from traditional marketing strategies that often segment consumers into broad, static categories or personas. Tools like user personas can be helpful when building brands and new products, but they can also box you in when the market and, ultimately, people are more dynamic than a persona allows. Time and time again in user research, I see brands and leadership that do not allow their users to change or be who they really are, which are two things I can guarantee your user will do.
Ryanair is one brand that illustrates the value of recognizing and immersing itself in the reality of its users. Their clear vision of their patrons — who place primary regard on budget-friendly cheap air travel — guides the company to tailor its public engagement. In one TikTok post, a Ryanair customer talks about how Ryanair is so cheap and doesn’t care about other parts of the travel experience so much so that they will probably make a meme out of this video of him complaining — and they do.
Ryanair memes a video on TikTok of their user discussing how Ryanair is cheap and does not care about customer service
Ryanair’s ability to lean into and celebrate the position that its riders are, above all, in search of cheap pricing has translated into the brand capitalizing on this often funny dynamic and creating a large social media following in the process. What Ryanair is doing here is recognizing and valuing the intrinsic diversity, complexity and authenticity of its users rather than adhering to rigid or idealized user narratives and placing judgments if users don’t fit their ideals of what a traveler should be. Meet users where they are rather than where your brand assumes or wishes them to be because AI already is.
4. Go macro, not micro with insights.
Unlike micro insights focused on optimization and incremental improvements or mid-level insights for broader general user understanding, macro insights forecast future consumer trends and behaviors. They unearth patterns and are anchored by users’ emotions. Macro user insights enable brands to anticipate changes in consumer emotions, guiding proactive strategic decisions. AI will become decently good at micro and mid-level insight generation, but it takes nuance and context to unearth macro user insights that set strategic direction for a brand. In an article titled The UX Research Reckoning is Here, Judd Antin proposes that UX researchers focus too much on what he calls middle-range research, which he defines as “a deadly combination of interesting to researchers and marginally useful for actual product and design work. It’s disproportionately responsible for the worst things people say and think about UXR. Doing so much of it just doesn’t deliver enough business value.”
Antin’s critique underscores the importance of macro insights in not only predicting future trends but also in aligning research efforts with the broader strategic goals of a brand. Emphasizing macro insights does not diminish the value of micro or mid-level research, but it places them within a strategic framework where their contributions to incremental improvements and understanding serve the higher goal of strategic brand direction and foresight. This approach helps ensure research not only informs design and product development in the present but also contributes to the long-term strategic positioning of a brand in a competitive and ever-changing market. By reorienting focus toward macro insights, your brand can forge deeper connections with your users, anticipate shifts in the market and innovate proactively, securing your place as a leader in the AI-enhanced future of the user brand experience.
Remember the leap of faith you took by telling your secrets to an AI chatbot? It was never just about help with a difficult relationship, choosing the next binge-worthy series or finding the right brunch outfit. It was about embracing the unknown, trusting the process and learning a bit about yourself along the way. AI anticipates our needs but also becomes a trusted confidant, guiding us through mundane and meaningful choices.
The real secret isn’t just in the questions we ask or the advice we seek but in the profound shift towards a future where our interactions with AI reflect a deeper understanding of ourselves. The most interesting secrets are those that lead us to discover more about what it means to be human.
The ground of our cultural landscape is always moving, quietly and imperceptibly. Country music has taken decades to change in its sounds and stories. The designs of our buildings evolve iteratively and over generations. Our spiritual relationship to nature, from the naturalist poetry of Thoreau to the nature-shaping ideology of Roosevelt, took nearly a century to evolve. Flipping through the pages of culture, it’s hard to know when something ended and something new began.
But unlike music genres and architecture, I can tell you the exact moment when modern environmentalism took hold of the public consciousness.
The 1968 “Earthrise” photo taken on the Apollo 8 mission, among the first photos of earth taken from space, immediately changed our understanding of what it meant to be a human on this planet. Seeing the Earth through the universe’s eyes, a planet whose entirety we could suddenly hold in our heads, fundamentally changed the way we measure our relationship to it.
There were famous ecologists like John Muir and conservationists like Rachel Carlson that came before that photo, but none of them compelled us to recalibrate so quickly. “Earthrise” snapped our brains to a new grid because it gave us a new ruler to measure by.
“Earthrise” photo taken from the Apollo 8 mission, 1968.
Shifts in values and beliefs slowly change the topography of our cultural landscape, but in some places we experience landslides that happen so quickly, we can lose our bearings. Cultural borders that we thought fell in one place now, strangely, fall in another, and the way we measure the distance between our values requires an update.
The spaces in which we are using old rulers to measure new things hold tremendous opportunity. These are the spaces with latent demand, waiting for someone or something to give us new units of measurement, so that we may experience a culture in the way we have been waiting to experience it.
New rulers always unlock value, and there has perhaps never been a period when so many of our rulers have been out of date at the same time.
The protracted debate over working from home isn’t really about quality of work. It’s about the fact that we cannot shift our measurement of work from people-in-seats to output-of-people, and there’s a very good reason for that.
Western culture has a unique interpretation of time. How you spend your time, how much time something costs you, deciding if something is worth your time, or if you should invest more time into it, are all linguistic reminders that time is money.
This intimate time-money relationship has also shaped our infrastructure, from hourly wages and yearly budgets to interest on loans.
Without the metaphor of money, we simply cannot talk about time. It’s such a strong mental model that it’s quite literally written into our language and systems. In their book Metaphors We Live By, linguists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson suggest that metaphors like this mediate our experiences of the world. They are the rulers by which we measure our lived experiences.
Remote work is a proven success, and a clear indicator that our work-time relationship is changing. So why is there such tension here? It comes from the fact that while our work culture has changed, our implicit measurements of it have not.
Our language and metaphors – meaning the medium through which we filter our experiences – make it impossible to decouple time from money. Using this ruler to measure the world tells us that if you cannot control time, you cannot control revenue. You could argue that without a new ruler having really taken hold, businesses and leaders simply cannot rise above the horizon to see a new possible future.
Old rulers do not get replaced easily. We build infrastructure and systems around them, buttress them with language and rituals over time, and escalate our commitments to them as a society.
A measurement is only useful when everyone can agree to it, or as Anil Seth has said, reality is just a hallucination we can all agree on. Changing our rulers, even a little, is impossible without a critical mass of people willing to change their realities at the same time. That critical mass can take generations to materialize.
Relationships are no longer just about “love”, but about self-actualization according to Northwestern psychology professor Eli J. Finkel’s incredible research on the Suffocation Model of Marriage. Yet we still use the old ruler of “love” to measure our romantic lives.
“The Suffocation of Marriage: Climbing Mount Maslow Without Enough Oxygen,” by E. J. Finkel, C. M. Hui, K. L. Carswell, and G. M. Larson, 2014, Psychological Inquiry
From the mid-1800s up until the 1960s, the measurement of a good marriage was love. As America became wealthier, more urbanized and social safety nets began to form, the “functions of marriage became increasingly sentimental. Its primary purpose was to help spouses fulfill needs like loving, being loved, and experiencing romantic passion—the sorts of belonging and love needs toward the middle of Maslow’s hierarchy.”
That measurement of love stays with us today, in our myths, media and marriage vows. What most people don’t consciously realize, however, is that around 1965 the culture of marriage had already changed:
“In the self-expressive era (1965–present), diverse forces—including the civil rights and feminist movements, the Vietnam War, and the rise of humanistic psychology— converged to generate the countercultural revolution, which fostered an increased emphasis on self-discovery, self-expression, and authenticity… Americans continued to look to their marriage to fulfill their love and belonging needs, but they also increasingly looked to it to fulfill needs like self-esteem, self-expression, and personal growth—the sorts of esteem and self-actualization needs toward the top of Maslow’s hierarchy.”
Looking at the steep incline of the mountain in Finkel’s Suffocation Model, one thing becomes abundantly clear – the institute of marriage is begging for a new yardstick. Love is an outdated ruler that measures the wrong thing, potentially leading us away from what we’re really searching for.
Once you see it in love, you start to see it everywhere. The 75 Hard Challenge and Bryan Johnson have emerged because status is no longer just about ease, but about sacrifice (see our senior strategistZach Lamb‘s great thinking on this topic). Gwynneth and her disciples rose from the failures of women’s medicine to show us that wellness was no longer just about health, but about rebirth. Hotels made us measure travel in units of leisure, until Airbnb changed it to units of belonging, and now concepts like psychedelic retreats and sleep tourism are changing it to units of emotional restoration.
If your brand is in a space where old rulers are still being used, there is tremendous opportunity in teaching people a new way of measuring what matters to them. It creates new language and new context. Most importantly, it has the potential to put your brand in a consideration set of one.
Just like the Suffocation Model indicates, getting people to do the hard work of changing their perspectives may leave laggards struggling at the bottom of the mountain, but those that make it to the top experience far more satisfaction than those who never make the trek to begin with.
The concept of childhood is only a few hundred years old but once it was established during the Enlightenment, this new ruler created a cascade of new labor laws, changed the way children were depicted in fine art and literature, and led to the evolution of childhood education. Children were no longer seen as small adults, taking on adult roles and responsibilities (and oftentimes abuses). Childhood was now a protected and measured part of early life.
A great deal of our early culture around childhood was molded by philosophers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Locke and Sigmund Freud who explored notions of innocence, tabula rasa (a child’s blank slate mind) and childhood traumas.
But then came children’s media in the form of Disney and Warner Brothers and they gave us some of the most powerful measures of childhood that continue to unlock value for us today, moving us from innocence and purity to new measures of imagination and awareness.
Disney cemented the ideals of childhood in the form of boundless imagination. Through cartoons like Fantasia, Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, and the magic of Disneyland and its Imagineers, a whole nation came to see a good childhood as a measure of creativity. We continue to exalt creativity in the toys we buy our children and the preschools we send them to today.
Warner Brothers saw the need for a different kind of ruler. The humor in ‘Looney Toons’ and ‘Merrie Melodies’ was far more sophisticated and subversive than anything else at that time. The artwork was strikingly modernist, the jokes were complex and satirical, and the storylines sometimes referred to current events and politics. Warner Brothers saw childhood as a measure of awareness. The belief that kids could understand and appreciate more adult themes is the same belief that fuels box office hits like the Lego Movie and Barbie today.
Left: The art of imagination in Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, 1937. Right: The modernist artwork of Warner Brothers’ Wile E. Coyote in Looney Tunes, 1949.
Interestingly, both Disney and Warner Brothers created measurements that welcomed adults into the world of children, another unique value unlock that we are still enjoying as a culture. They’re proof that every ruler we use has the potential to dampen or amplify our lived experiences.
Our measurements are our agreed-upon codes for what matters, but once they are installed into our culture, it can be very hard to know when it’s time to rethink how we measure things in the first place. Our beliefs and feelings have a tendency to move forward before we have the models to describe them and the artifacts of culture – language, norms, systems – are a lagging indicator of who we really are.
If we’re not measuring the right things anymore, that’s your brand’s opportunity to change the landscape. How we measure is how we know the world, and new rulers can not only give us new experiences, but also make us new people.
