Last week in Cannes, authenticity (again) emerged as the industry’s favorite answer to seemingly every question about AI. Want to preserve trust in the AI era? Need to produce quality content that isn’t AI slop? The answer to all that ails you is authenticity. 

The problem is that, in reacting to AI, we’ve gradually narrowed its scope. We debate the legitimacy of AI-augmented content, whether creators will help us relate to customers in a more real way than celebrities, and whether Tagline A feels more rooted in humanity than Taglines B-ZZ. 

We spend far less time asking a more foundational question: Did the business behind that campaign actually earn the right to tell a story it wants to tell?

July 4th and America250 offer marketers a useful litmus test: Is patriotic marketing too polarizing?

The right way to wave the flag

To address the elephant in the room, yes, nationalism is more politically charged than it used to be. More than half of Americans (56%) say the American flag has become more polarizing over time. 

For years, the Fourth of July playbook was remarkably consistent: fireworks, military flyovers, and flags printed on the same products Americans buy every day. But today, that formula carries more risk, leaving some brands wondering if they should actually do anything for America250 at all. 

Despite the politicization of, well, everything, Independence Day remains a source of national pride. About half of Americans (49%) say patriotic branding makes them view a brand more positively. Only 3% believe brands shouldn’t celebrate America at all.

Consumers want to feel patriotic, but they want it to feel meaningful rather than performative. Some of the most interesting campaigns of the year are striking that chord. 

Coca-Cola, for example, is doubling down on community. Yes, they are printing flags on a limited edition run of cans. But the brand is also getting out into communities in a year-long campaign by committing to 250,000 volunteer hours focused on tackling food insecurity, sustainability, and youth empowerment. They also created a mural initiative with local artists in cities across the country. 

It’s a campaign that gives consumers the ability to celebrate in small ways within their own communities. 

Authenticity starts long before the campaign does

Increasingly, as consumers wonder if what they are seeing is AI-generated or if a brand really deserves their trust, authenticity no longer belongs to the creative department. It belongs to the business. 

When we asked Americans which brands best represent the country, they named Ford, Walmart, and Coca-Cola, all of which are brands deeply embedded in everyday American life. They’ve earned this connection, not because they flew the biggest flag, but rather because they make everyday life possible and enjoyable to a huge percentage of the population. 

But it’s not just where people shop and what they buy that helps them form opinions about a brand. Sometimes, brands show up in consumers’ lives in ways that actually put money back in their wallets. Our research found that nearly two-thirds of Americans trust companies that invest in local jobs more than companies that simply run patriotic advertising campaigns. Consumers reward brands that demonstrate patriotism through community impact.

Another way to build relevance is simply to remind consumers of how a brand helps them enjoy what they already love. Through its “Taste of America” campaign, Kraft Heinz, an official sponsor of America250, connects summer and celebrations back to the brand through depictions of cookouts that are made possible in part by its products. 

Patriotism doesn’t have to look like flags and fireworks. And the conversation around authenticity shouldn’t stop at creativity—it should permeate every part of the business that ultimately connects to how consumers experience the brand. 

Here is a marketing riddle: Take one of the best B2B brand builders alive, give him a big title, a near-trillion-dollar company to market, and the most famous product on earth to sell. 

Why would that be a disaster waiting to happen? 

Welcome to Colin Fleming’s new job at OpenAI.

Fleming is the real deal. Thirteen years at Salesforce, culminating as evp of global marketing. Two years as CMO of ServiceNow, working wonders. He knows how to take a complex B2B product, build a brand around it, and drive pipeline. He isn’t the kind of marketer you hire when you are serious about enterprise revenue, he is literally at the very top of the list. But he may be walking into the hardest marketing job in the world.

Fleming joins as CMO, Business—a new title, deliberately scoped to OpenAI’s enterprise push. His predecessor, Kate Rouch, stepped down in April after fighting late-stage breast cancer through her entire tenure. She led global campaigns, ran back-to-back Super Bowl ads, built the marketing function from the ground up, and did it all while undergoing treatment. An extraordinary act of professional commitment. 

But OpenAI’s brand is in trouble right now. Start with the structural chaos. In the space of a few weeks earlier this year, the company lost its CMO, its COO transitioned to a vague “special projects” role, its head of product took medical leave, and a series of senior researchers walked out. The company is simultaneously preparing for an IPO while projecting losses of $14 billion by the end of 2026. 

That is not a stable platform from which to build an enterprise brand.

Then there is the advertising decision. In January, OpenAI confirmed it would begin running ads inside ChatGPT’s free tier. The format is contextual, clearly labeled, separated from responses. Rationally it all makes sense. Enterprise and paid tiers remain ad-free. OpenAI insists the ads will not influence ChatGPT’s answers. 

But we do not live in a rational world, even in the highly processed realm of AI. A Harris Poll survey taken in the days before launch found that 75% of Americans would trust AI shopping recommendations less if its results were sponsored. When you await answers from a blinking cursor, answers you don’t know the answer to, trust becomes the single most important asset OpenAI has, especially in the enterprise market. 

Fleming understands this territory better than almost anyone. His entire career has been built on the specific challenge of selling to procurement committees, convincing CFOs, and building the kind of sustained brand credibility that closes enterprise deals. 

Salesforce under Marc Benioff was the master class in B2B brand-building: clear positioning, massive share of voice, distinctive brand assets, relentless customer success storytelling. Fleming absorbed all of it, so much so that ServiceNow followed the same playbook, and might even have applied it better. He knows exactly what enterprise buyers need to hear, and how often they need to hear it.

But Fleming’s Salesforce instincts will now collide directly with the OpenAI reality. 

Salesforce and ServiceNow sold trust as their core proposition. Their customers willingly passed on sensitive data, critical workflows, revenue operations. The brand promise was: we will never screw you. 

That promise was credible because neither company faced a structural conflict between its consumer product and its enterprise product. OpenAI does. The free ChatGPT that runs ads is the same model enterprise customers are being asked to trust with their most sensitive internal data. That dissonance is not trivial.

Then there is the competitive context. Anthropic is suddenly the beast in the room. It is growing faster, smarter, cleaner, and it’s winning in the regulated industries—financial services, healthcare, legal—where enterprise deals are biggest and trust matters most. 

Meanwhile Google’s Gemini is slashing prices and going after developer mindshare. Fleming is not entering a market where OpenAI can coast on brand halo. He is entering a knife fight with a smaller-than-expected pocket knife, and facing a guy with the machete and a woman with an unlimited arsenal of throwing daggers.

The dual-CMO structure is also a potential issue. OpenAI has split marketing into two roles: one for consumer, one for business. Presented as sophistication, it’s actually an admission of conflict. The consumer brand and the enterprise brand have diverged to the point where one person cannot credibly manage both. That is a strategy problem, and not one Fleming can easily solve.

None of this should be read as a prediction that Fleming will fail. He is exactly what OpenAI needs. If anyone can build a credible B2B brand on top of a messy underlying reality, it is someone with his track record. 

But good hires do not always fix declining fortunes. They work within them, around them, and sometimes despite them. 

The real question for OpenAI is not whether Fleming is talented enough for this job. The question is whether the company is willing to make the harder strategic decisions that Fleming will inevitably ask. About product separation, about the advertising model, about what OpenAI for Business actually stands for. 

Hiring a marketer like Fleming is just the start of the problem being sorted.  

Publicis’ $2.2 billion acquisition of LiveRamp last month reawakened an old industry debate about neutrality.

But I believe we’re having the wrong conversation. 

While neutrality gives advertisers and agencies comfort that their tech partners are fair and open, it doesn’t provide insight into how their data is being used: how audiences are built, how identity is resolved, where data flowed, or whether their first-party data is strengthening their own advantage or someone else’s. 

For years, the industry has treated independence as a shortcut for trust. If a company sat outside platforms, agencies, or media owners, it was assumed to operate as neutral infrastructure. 

That logic made sense in a simpler market. But as advertising becomes increasingly algorithmic, data, identity, activation, supply, measurement, and optimization are interdependent. In that environment, neutrality becomes impossible to define. 

In an AI-powered world, transparency is what actually matters. The industry should move from asking who owns the asset to asking who can clearly prove what the asset is doing.

The stack has too many hiding places

The current ad tech stack was built in layers. Together, they create a maze. Every handoff adds a tax. Every hop creates signal loss. Every partner makes it harder to understand where performance came from, where money went, and where data ended up. 

Neutrality does not address this. Transparency does.

Recent research conducted by Cadent and Winterberry Group found that for every media dollar spent, 38 cents is absorbed by machinery in the middle, with just 47 cents going to actual working media.

The system should be getting more efficient. Instead, too much money is still disappearing between the advertiser and the publisher.

This is where neutrality becomes a distraction. A neutral system can still be expensive and opaque. It can still force marketers through too many steps, upcharges, and black boxes. Every hop introduces signal loss because the systems weren’t designed to work together. 

In an AI-powered world, siloed solutions will be at a disadvantage.  Unified advertising will favor interdependent technology that enables core parts of the advertising process to work together with less friction. It requires advertisers to use modular pieces of a stack that connect cleanly and transparently. 

A more unified, transparent stack gives advertisers a clearer view of how the system works, as well as its costs. Data flows are easier to trace. Economics are easier to understand. More of each dollar reaches working media. And performance is judged by whether the business is actually growing, rather than by vanity media metrics that look good in a dashboard. 

With AI-driven advertising, marketers are choosing more than vendors. As first-party data and campaign learnings become a source of intelligence, they’re choosing where their data teaches the system—where it’s capable of sharpening their own competitive advantage, but also strengthening a broader ecosystem beyond their control. Every advertiser should understand that trade-off.

Performance and transparency

Too often, marketers are presented with a false choice: accept opacity in exchange for performance. Let the machine optimize. Trust the platform. Focus on outcomes. Don’t ask questions. 

All based on the false promise of neutrality and independence.

But in the future, platforms must deliver both performance and transparency at the same time. 

Neutrality matters less if transparency is the standard that determines who deserves trust. If a platform cannot show how data moves, how money flows, and how results are made, advertisers should keep pushing until the technology is fully visible.

The industry does not need another round of neutrality pledges. It needs a higher bar. 

From sparking mass layoffs to reducing junior roles, there is much doom and gloom about how AI will impact the advertising business. 

That fear comes with reason. According to a Sunup report, 91% of senior US agency leaders expect AI to reduce agency headcounts, and over half (57%) of agencies have slowed or paused entry-level hiring.

As an agency owner who has lived through many sea changes in our business, I have a more positive outlook. I believe we can use AI to improve job satisfaction and make our work more enjoyable.

In his most recent annual letter to JPMorgan shareholders, Jamie Dimon shared his view that AI will improve and extend our lives in the decades to come. He predicts that AI will enable a 3.5-day work week, ultimately leading to happier, healthier people with more time to pursue their passions and stay active.

Dimon predicts this transformation will occur over the next 30 years, but I believe we can improve our employees’ lives using AI now.

Agentic AI does the boring stuff

No one got into this business because they love mundane, mindless work. The best agency people are the most curious: they get excited to learn a client’s business, pilot new methodologies, craft unique creative, and always have their eye on what’s coming next. 

Imagine the potential when what’s “next” also reduces the grind, eliminates mind-numbing admin work, and lets their brains breathe. AI agents can streamline many core agency functions, including account management, project management, and new business development.

An agent can ingest meeting transcripts, project scopes, RFPs, and client communications and synthesize key decisions and next steps. You’ll never have to go searching for when or where your client sent a document or provided feedback. It’s all instantly at the fingertips of your entire team.

Onboarding faster

Agencies often face the new employee quagmire: You hire someone because the current workload is too much for the team to handle, but that team is too busy to effectively train and onboard a new hire.  

Using AI to create a centralized knowledge base, accessed via natural language prompts, can help get new team members onboarded and up-to-speed quicker without burdening the rest of the team. 

This should never replace training with teams and leadership, but it does provide an easy way for new hires to learn how your agency operates without needing to find time on everyone’s calendars. AI helps you create a central brain for your agency that anyone can access.

Client expertise at your fingertips

Being experts in our clients’ businesses is crucial, and we all do the best we can: we use Google alerts, listen to shareholder calls, read the trades, comb social media, and share insights from client meetings to other teammates. But we can still miss key information and get blindsided by an announcement. 

AI can arm your teams with all of the information they need to be experts — on the client, as well as their category and competitors — in a fraction of the time. Your team will walk into every meeting or pitch feeling prepared and equipped to come up with solutions to business challenges. But most importantly, in a relationship-driven industry, your clients will feel seen, respected, and appreciated.

There is a lot of speculation and hand-wringing about the unintended consequences of AI. I believe that AI will empower our teams to accomplish much more, in much less time, and give them the ultimate bonus: more time to do the things that make them happy, healthy, and full of joy.

We are in the business of solving problems and being creative. AI has so much untapped potential to help us be better at both.  

Tim Cook was never going to be Steve Jobs. 

No one, possibly not even Jobs himself, could ever live up to the last great legend of 20^th century business. 

But, as his exit date is announced, how should marketers assess the man who stepped into those enormous, distressed sneakers in 2011 and took the helm at Apple?

When Cook took over Apple’s market cap sitting at around $350 billion. Today it sits at $4 trillion. So if we wanted to reduce his tenure to a single data point and this column to a superficial paragraph—which plenty of Wall Street analysts are perfectly happy to do—then there’s your proof point.

But there was more to Apple than just being profitable. And you can make a strong argument that the trajectory that Jobs had created before his departure accounts for a lot of that “success.” Fairly or not, we have all come to expect more from Cupertino. And the uncomfortable truth is that Cook’s Apple did not launch a single genuinely new product category that has actually mattered.

The Apple Watch? Clever. Profitable. A health device masquerading as a fashion item. But it didn’t redefine a category the way the iPhone redefined everything. AirPods were a solid hardware play—arguably Apple’s most culturally sticky product of the Cook era—but wireless earbuds were already a category. 

Apple just executed better than everyone else. The HomePod was a commercial embarrassment. Apple TV remains a perennial also-ran. And the Vision Pro—the grand swing, the big bet, the $3,500 headset that solves a problem nobody had—launched in Cupertino to thunderous applause from journalists and near-total indifference from actual consumers. Not exactly the iPhone moment Cook’s supporters promised.

Meanwhile, the thing Cook is brilliant at—operational excellence and margin expansion—has been weaponized against customers in ways that deserve scrutiny. 

The Services business, which Cook rightly transformed into Apple’s second engine, is built substantially on a tax on captive consumers. Google paying Apple somewhere north of $15 billion a year to remain the default search engine on Safari is a masterpiece of rent-seeking. Brilliant financially, but strategically shallow and ethically murky. So much so, that regulators on both sides of the Atlantic are circling.

Then there’s China. Cook bet big on its manufacturing, its consumers, and its growth. That bet made Apple vastly more profitable through the 2010s. It also created a strategic dependency that now looks genuinely dangerous. Relations between Washington and Beijing have deteriorated, Huawei is back, and Apple’s exposure to a single geography is a vulnerability that was entirely foreseeable and insufficiently hedged.

And then there is the future and the biggest miss of the Cook era: AI. 

Every company has to be on top and ahead with AI. But it’s particularly crucial for Apple, whose brand is built on three pillars: simplicity, humanity, and creativity. 

It should have led into the AI era. Instead, Siri is an idiot in a classroom filled with geniuses. 

And there appears to be little if any plan to fix things any time soon. 

And yet…

Go back to 2011. Steve Jobs is dead. The gravitational field that held Apple together has collapsed. The consensus view, quietly held by many in the industry, was that without Jobs’ fanatical product vision, Apple would revert to the mean. 

Most founder-led companies do. Especially those so tightly wound around one human for their culture, coverage, leadership, and strategy.

But that did not happen. 

Cook held the wheel while keeping the culture together. He expanded Apple’s geographic reach. He built Services into a recurring revenue behemoth that now generates over $85 billion annually and is growing faster than hardware. He executed the transition to Apple Silicon—one of the most technically ambitious platform transitions in tech history—with a smoothness that was almost suspicious. 

He shepherded Apple through a global pandemic, a semiconductor shortage, and a supply chain crisis, and came out the other side with margins that made competitors weep.

He also did something Jobs never particularly bothered with: he put Apple on the right side of privacy. At a moment when the tech industry’s relationship with consumer data was becoming toxic, Cook made privacy a genuine differentiator. Whether you find it principled or cynical (it’s probably a bit of both), it was strategically astute and has become a meaningful brand pillar.

Cook’s Apple is the most financially successful company in human history. That’s extraordinary. He took an organization built on the charisma and genius of a singular individual and, keeping his own ego totally at bay, institutionalized it. 

The honest assessment: Cook is a superb operator and a competent strategist who has been a mediocre product visionary. 

He has maximized the value of what Jobs built, but has not meaningfully extended it into new territory. He saved the church. He just hasn’t delivered a new gospel.

The trillion-dollar question—What does Apple do next?—remains unanswered after 13 years. 

When Cook took the helm, he was up against Samsung and Motorola. His replacement, John Ternus, now faces a much tougher, more paradigm-shifting assortment of rivals. And at some point, the market will stop being patient.

Perhaps we should stop asking how well Tim followed Steve, and ask what Ternus will do in September when he replaces Tim.

Every brand needs an enemy. A competitor you choose to benchmark against and beat. 

Not every rival in the market. Not the whole category. Just one brand, one that overlaps most directly with your business, performs well enough to be worth studying, and is close enough to be attacked credibly.

The concept forces prioritization.

Once you make that choice, competing becomes more disciplined. Instead of asking what’s happening in the market, you start asking harder and more useful questions: Which rival matters most to us? Why this one? Where can we beat them? What would winning actually look like? And which actions deserve disproportionate focus?

The very real problem 

Some companies study competitors to death, tracking share, benchmarking prices, dissecting launches, and filling decks with competitive analysis. Others claim, with great confidence, not to have competitors.

Both miss the same thing: a clear rival, a clear focus, and a clear plan for what to do next.

In many organizations, competitive analysis stops just before the only part that matters: “So what?” Teams struggle to convert all that intelligence into a small number of operational choices. What should sales do differently? What should marketing change? Where should revenue management push? Where should it stop admiring the spreadsheets and actually do something?

Too often, the output is a haze of noble intentions: improve visibility, strengthen premium credentials, sharpen innovation, support conversion. 

None of this is specific enough to win.

Choose the right enemy

A good enemy, in general, should be larger than you, but not so much larger that the comparison flatters ambition more than it guides action.

Declaring war on the category giant may sound bold at the annual conference. It often means very little in practice. That was certainly true for Schweppes in soft drinks, where Coca-Cola was an obvious giant, but a poor enemy brand. 

It was simply too large in awareness, budgets, distribution power, and market gravity to be a useful operational benchmark. 

The best enemy is the brand from which you can realistically steal listings, shelf space, displays, customers, and share.

Turn observations into projects

At Suntory, Sipsmith’s decision to beat Whitley Neill in the premium gin category, instead of vaguely positioning Sipsmith against a broad and noisy set of competitors, immediately made our discussions more useful. 

How did Whitley Neill structure pricing? Where was its range stronger on shelf? Which equivalent SKUs rotated faster, and why? Where were the distribution gaps? Which occasions did it serve better? And where was it stronger in visibility, execution, or retailer argument?

Those questions were not academic. They revealed the commercial system behind performance and turned that knowledge into projects. Underperforming SKUs were no longer just disappointing charts, but concrete action points. Range gaps became portfolio projects. Distribution gaps clarified where effort should go first. Stronger floor displays pointed to where execution had to improve.

The enemy-brand lens also strengthened the retailer conversation. It helped show where Sipsmith had the better argument, where an assortment looked incomplete or unbalanced, and why certain listings should be won. That is what many competitive reviews fail to do. They generate insight, but not consequences. An enemy brand narrows that gap by forcing the organization to move from commentary to action.

A better organizational focus

Headquarters might admire complexity, but field teams cannot execute 10 priorities at once. 

One of the recurring flaws in strategy is that leadership passes too much clutter into the organization and too little clarity. 

The enemy-brand method imposes a more brutal but more useful discipline: identify the few actions that matter most against the chosen rival and execute them forcefully, and without constantly changing your mind.

That concept travels well across functions, from sales and revenue management to marketing to supply chain to general management. 

In that sense, the enemy brand is not just a brand tool. It is a coordination tool.

Many operating plans have respectable-sounding ambitions that feel arbitrary or are operationally soft. But once you know you are at 68% distribution on a core SKU and the chosen rival is at 85%, you do not just have a vague ambition to “improve distribution.” You have a concrete gap to close, and a legitimate objective to track. 

The same applies to secondary displays, assortment breadth, feature frequency, or shelf share.

Study the playbook, not the personality

There is an important caveat: if you focus too much on an enemy brand, don’t you risk turning your own brand into a copy?

It is a fair objection. Choosing an enemy does not mean copying it. The point is not to imitate the rival’s brand personality, tone of voice, visual identity, or cultural style. That road usually leads to a weaker imitation.

Don’t study the personality. Study the playbook. Study the range architecture, the pricing discipline, the promotional rhythm, the route to market, the merchandising standards, the innovation cadence, the selling story, the structural drivers of performance. 

A brand can learn a great deal from an enemy without becoming derivative.

The goal is not to become a copy, but to become more dangerous.

My father spent 39 years at Nestlé, and often described the food business as one of the most operationally-demanding areas in consumer goods. 

Unpredictable costs, complex supply chains, and intense retail competition make it really difficult for even leading brands to keep growing the bottom line. 

So Unilever’s decision to combine its foods business with McCormick & Company isn’t a retreat from food, but a re-focus on areas where it can naturally make more money.

For decades, Unilever’s foods portfolio, which included global brands like Hellmann’s and Knorr, built deep consumer trust and helped define modern brand management. 

But while food categories are culturally relevant, they usually have thinner margins and are much more of a logistical headache than beauty, personal care, and home care.

Where brand legacy and financial returns collide

This type of portfolio realignment has become more common as public CPG giants are pressured to improve margins, and avoid lines of business that don’t pay off.

These companies are increasingly separating their low-margin businesses that need massive scale just to break even, from their businesses selling premium products where price increases won’t scare customers away.

Unilever is giving ownership of its storied food brands to a company focused on flavor and seasoning. 

McCormick also operates a business model built around ingredients and taste, so it can be more efficient and innovate on its products much better than a diversified conglomerate like Unilever.

Here’s what marketers can learn from this

First, companies are going to invest in products that make the most money.

Even iconic brands aren’t going to get funded if they’re selling low margin products in a sprawling portfolio. Marketers need to understand this to build strategies that align with their organization’s financial priorities.

Second, deep focus can create a better future for a brand.

Given McCormick’s expertise, Unilever’s food products may benefit from a different product roadmap, partnerships with other brands, and different positioning. These factors can impact how quickly new food products are released, where media is allocated, and potentially lead to bolder marketing creative.

Third, this deal reflects a greater trend of CPG businesses trying to simplify

Rather than managing sprawling portfolios across unrelated categories, companies are increasingly concentrating resources where they believe they can be most competitive and maximize value for shareholders.

A win-win for Unilever and McCormick

With this restructuring, Unilever can concentrate on beauty, personal care, and home care—categories that usually have stronger margins and faster global growth. 

McCormick has the opportunity to deepen its leadership in flavor and expand its reach across adjacent food segments.

For the broader CPG ecosystem, the move is a reminder that even iconic brands are governed by economic fundamentals. 

The power of brand equity doesn’t override the basic economics of selling products: they need to be profitable, they can’t be too difficult to produce, and they need to grow.

Marketing and brand leaders need to navigate organizations shaped by the financial needs of their companies as much as by consumer insight. 

They must understand that balance to make the best case for the brands they support to get the budgets they need.

Big companies always have a pecking order 

First the CEO. Then CFO—who often eventually becomes CEO. This conveyor belt of corporate succession is replicated across every sector on earth. 

But in fashion, the CFO is a back-office function. It is the creative director who sits alongside the CEO, sometimes as a junior partner, sometimes as an equal, occasionally as the more powerful of the two. 

In an industry where the product is aesthetics and the currency is desire, the person who decides what the clothes look like, how they feel, what they mean and how they are presented shapes everything.

When analysts at Bernstein began scoring fashion show debuts on a scale of one to 10 last year, treating runway moments like earnings calls, they were not being eccentric. They were belatedly catching up to a reality that everyone inside the industry already understood: creation drives commerce.

The creative director role is one of the strangest in business. They must produce multiple collections a year—some houses demand twelve—while simultaneously managing a design studio, overseeing advertising campaigns, sitting for press interviews, and embodying a coherent aesthetic vision that can communicate something from a single garment in three seconds flat.

Karl Lagerfeld, who held the role at Chanel for 36 years until his death in 2019, described his function simply: “I am like a parasite. I need a host to express what I feel.” 

It’s a precise account of what creative directors do: Walking into someone else’s house and making it theirs. Making it fresh. Making it desired. But also making sure the house still resembles the original house when the founder lived there.

Tom Ford arrived at Gucci in 1994 when the company was losing $22 million a year and its own outgoing creative director had declared that “no one would dream of wearing Gucci.” 

Ford’s diagnosis was simple. “I wanted to bring the edge back to Gucci that it had in the Fifties and Sixties,” he told WWD at the time. Within a year of his appointment, Gucci sales had risen 90%. 

By the time he left a decade later, annual revenues had gone from $230 million to $3 billion. 

Veronique Nichanian, who stepped down earlier this year from Hermès’ menswear after 37 years—longer than almost any creative director in the modern luxury era— turned Hermès menswear from an empty corner of the business into one of the most copied aesthetics in the world.

Fashion went through the “great reset of 2025” with the debut of 15 new creative directors in a single season. 

Gucci, Chanel, Dior, Balenciaga, Maison Margiela, Loewe, Bottega Veneta, Celine, Versace, Fendi, Jean Paul Gaultier, Mugler, Jil Sander, Proenza Schouler, Marni—all turned over simultaneously.

Bernstein is already scoring the results: Jonathan Anderson’s Dior debut earned a 9.1. Matthieu Blazy’s Chanel scored a 9.0. The rest of the field are still finding their feet.

The 3 challenges facing every creative director

Finding the right creative director requires solving three problems simultaneously, and most houses solve only two.

The first is commercial instinct: the ability to produce work that generates desire at the price points the house needs, not just desire among critics and editors. 

The second is industrial stamina: the physical and creative capacity to produce upward of six full collections a year, plus campaigns, collaborations, store concepts and whatever cultural moment the PR team has planned. There is a reason that creative directors entering rehab is so much more than an industry cliche. 

The third, and most difficult requirement, is fit with the brand’s DNA. Not slavish reproduction of the archive, but genuine fluency in what the house has always been about. An ability to understand the brand’s language before attempting to speak new sentences.

Jonathan Anderson understood this when he took the full Dior role this season, stepping up from menswear to oversee the whole house. His show notes read like an MBA in brand revitalisation: “Daring to enter the house of Dior requires an empathy with its history, a willingness to decode its language, and the resoluteness to put your own stamp on it.”

Gucci, which has burned through four consecutive creative directors in a decade and is troubled once again, needs to pay attention to Anderson’s three-stage model.

Revenues have fallen from 10.5 billion euros in 2022 to less than 6 billion euros last year, largely through Sabato de Sarno’s failed attempt to pivot toward quiet luxury—a direction so at odds with Gucci’s actual identity that it felt less like a revitalisation than a face transplant.

The house’s solution was to appoint Demna, the Georgian-born designer who spent ten years at Balenciaga building his reputation on subversion, irony, and deliberate ugliness. 

Whether that approach will work for a house whose DNA runs on Italian sensuality, sex appeal, and unapologetic excess is currently the talk of fashion. Demna’s first full show in Milan drew polarised reviews: “necessary disruption” from his supporters, “Basic Instinct cosplay” from his critics. Bernstein scored it 7.6 out of 10, calling it “more good than bad”.

Ford turned Gucci around in 1994 because the brand still had an identity to rescue and the edge of the Fifties and Sixties he could reach back and retrieve. The question nobody can answer yet is whether Gucci, after this many reinventions, still has that kind of bedrock to build from.

The houses that remember Anderson’s sequence—empathy, decoding, then originality—are the ones compounding right now: Chanel. Dior. Hermès. 

The ones that skipped steps one and two are reading Bernstein reports and wincing and already considering replacements.

Many will have done a double take recently after seeing the words “Netflix”, “Warner,” and “deal” in a headline together. But rather than a last-gasp plot twist in the streamer’s bidding war with Paramount, the “Warner” in question is Warner Music Group. The deal grants Netflix multi-year, first-look privileges on documentary series and films exploring “the lives, music, and legacies of WMG’s legendary and contemporary artists and songwriters,” per the press release.

Beneath the headline, what does this deal signal about the future of artists and music IP more broadly? And should brands be taking notice?

For anyone watching culture closely, the partnership makes total sense. Music storytelling is as big as ever — just ask Sam Mendes, currently making not one but four Beatles films. Music docs have boomed in recent years with no signs of abating. There is a massive appetite not only for the music itself but for everything orbiting it: artists’ back stories, creative processes, archives, mythology. WMG is sitting on vast wells of valuable narrative IP to add to revenue from streaming, touring, and sync.

In an era of infinite content and fractured attention, a tentpole documentary is an increasingly powerful lever to create a mass cultural moment. It’s the Taylor Swift playbook. A premium doc gives an artist the chance to deepen their story, reach audiences beyond their existing fanbase, and shape how their work is understood at a bigger cultural scale. Done well, it doesn’t just support a release, it becomes part of it, building legacy and reactivating catalogue simultaneously. For current artists and future signings alike, the WMG proposition just got considerably more compelling.

Netflix, meanwhile, has been building a reputation for premium music documentaries for years: Beyoncé, Travis Scott, Lewis Capaldi, Taylor Swift, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers have all had “the Netflix treatment.” This deal deepens that play, giving Netflix a pipeline of premium, sanctioned music storytelling with built-in fandom, at a moment when recognizable IP and event-style viewing matter more than ever.

So how can a deal this monumental genuinely push the medium forward?

The answer comes down to artistic integrity, risk-taking, and bravery. The best documentaries don’t just talk about an artist’s canon, they contribute to it. Aidan Zamiri’s The Moment is an extension of Charli XCX’s world, with a meta approach that is inexorably Brat. Brett Morgen’s Moonage Daydream plunges viewers into David Bowie’s kaleidoscopic imagination. 20,000 Days on Earth isn’t a dutiful documentary so much as a stylized, fictionalized portrait of Nick Cave that feels inseparable from his artistic practice.

Contribution to the canon is also the key to brands playing a meaningful role. Pharrell Williams’ Piece by Piece using Lego as its form is an extension of Pharrell’s design-minded, color-saturated world, not a shallow brand sponsorship. Gap has been a catalyst for artists’ careers since the 1990s, with Katseye the latest example; its appointment of Pam Kaufman as chief entertainment officer could see that involvement broaden beyond branded music videos. Adidas’ place in the Oasis story is uncontestable, so it will be telling to see how the brand extends its involvement when perhaps the biggest documentary of 2026 arrives later this year.

As for the bigger play this deal signals, one has to look beyond the documentary format as the only entry point. Warner has made no secret of its appetite to move with technology — as seen via its partnerships with AI music platforms Suno and Udio — and Netflix’s other capabilities are equally significant. 

World-building is the game for the modern artist: constructing a coherent creative universe that extends beyond music to the live show, the red carpet, the brand partnerships. Many WMG artists have pioneered this thinking, not least Gorillaz, who have always been about stories bigger than their music.

Netflix has an ever-diversifying assortment of services at its disposal: live event programming (BTS’s recent concert livestream drew more than 18 million viewers from 190 countries); gaming (a stated focus for 2026); and physical fan experiences via the growing Netflix House property. It’s a platform built for turning fandom into something stickier and more expansive, and music artists should make full use of it. 

It’s not inconceivable that a global artist like Dua Lipa might premiere a new album on Netflix via a concert special, pair it with a behind-the-scenes documentary or a short film deepening the album’s narrative, and layer in further on-platform experiences for fans with a physical event or merchandise activation at Netflix House. One artist, one album cycle, one platform, multiple surfaces. That is a fundamentally different proposition to what a label or a streaming deal could offer alone. 

There is extraordinary scope for brands to make all of this bigger and more interesting, but only if they understand the intricacies of an artist’s world and what it means to be additive rather than extractive — resisting partnerships that feel opportunistic, and instead offering depth and richness in a way that only they could.

Only then can brands help expand on what this deal truly promises: to shape the legacies of artists and the worlds they have built.