Writing.
Unpacking context until the brand opportunity becomes obvious. That's the work, and the writing is where it happens in public.
The Measured Cost of Curiosity
The AI bill is the measured cost of sating human curiosity, dressed up as strategy. Direction is the discount.
You don't need a Parthenon
Brand compounds by building fragile memory structures in the buyer's mind. Coherent repetition strengthens them, incoherent variation chips at them, and the discipline is accessible at any scale.
You have hired ten thousand junior designers
You've hired ten thousand junior designers without noticing. Here's the executive-scale governance problem nobody at the top table currently owns.
What a brand system actually contains
Most brand assets are documents, not systems: static, advisory, and unread. Seven components separate a live brand system from a very expensive PDF, and the gap between them is now the moat.
Slow Haste.
The last time production got this cheap, one Venetian printer answered by refusing to compete on volume and putting a dolphin on everything he shipped. Five centuries later, the mark is still in use, and the answer for the age of generative AI turns out to be almost embarrassingly similar.
You are no longer the one describing your company
Somewhere, right now, an AI agent is telling a buyer about your business.
How Models Read Your Brand
Search rewarded pages. Models reward entities. A brand can rank perfectly and still be unreadable to the machine, which now mediates more of your discovery than you think. Legibility to AI is no longer a technical chore. It is part of being distinctive.
The Three Body Problem
Most brand strategy solves for two audiences. The third is the one that decides whether any of it survives contact with the real world.
Your brand is not the product
Brand isn't what your product does. Brand is what your customer believes about themselves when they choose you.
Me, an Empty Room, and 85 Miles of Red Wool
An agency I once heard about had a wall of business cards and red wool. Their whole business, visible. The idea stuck. This is what happened when I tried to build one.
The measure is not the thing
The field's loudest advocates for creative thinking have applied almost none of it to the definition of creativity itself. They've taken one expression of the thing, the short emotional film, and built an entire measurement infrastructure around it. Then they've defended that infrastructure as though it were the thing itself. Creativity isn't a format. It's the discovery or invention of meaning.
On Judgement
Judgement is not what you have when the answer is obvious. It is what you need when it is not.
The Compounding Problem
Before that, you are making deposits. After that, you are drawing interest.
Obey the Brief, or not.
The brief is not the starting point. It is the first hypothesis. Treat it like one.
The Encode Layer
Most brand strategies are written for humans. The problem is that the things executing them now are not.
Inside Five Corporate Rebrands: Five Rules for Making Brand Change Work
Most rebrands are a mistake. After working inside five corporate rebrands across technology, agencies, media, and heavy industry, one lesson is clear. A logo change means nothing unless the company itself changes.
Brand inside the machine
The brand book sits in a shared drive. Polite. Unopened. Meanwhile the tools hum. Here is what to do about it.
Your Instincts Are Wrong
I booked a one-way ticket to Shanghai with a beginner's Mandarin and no plan. What I learned there still shapes everything I do.
Curiosity Without End
It starts with Bayes in seventeentwentysomething. Why the habits of an eighteenth-century Presbyterian minister still explain how the most powerful AI systems in the world actually work.
Coke Is Jingling All the Way
Coke has 137 years of its own advertising to train an AI on. The result is the perfect case study on the advantage long-term brands have in the AI era — and a warning for everyone else.
I Still Want My Hovercar
We do not want less. We want better. We want progress without the punish. On the economics, engineering, and stubborn optimism of the green transition.