Nobody gets into advertising to become a manager. But if you’re good at it, that’s where you end up.

Inevitably, your job moves from making things to nurturing your teams’ ideas, managing their careers, and taking the hits so they can do the work. It’s the hardest pivot in our business outside of landing your first job.

And the industry is terrible at preparing creatives for it. 

I struggled with this transition more than I’d like to admit. Watching other managers helped. The great ones showed me what to aim for and the bad ones showed me what to avoid. But osmosis has its limits. 

So I started reading. Dozens of leadership books later, these are the five I keep turning to.

1. Herding Tigers, by Todd Henry

This book is built for the moment when a creative pivots from being a maker to leading a team of other makers. Henry gets into this identity shift without making it feel like homework. It gave me a way to put words around my own leadership style, and you can’t lead with intention until you know what you stand for.

If you only read one book on this list, read this one. I buy a copy for any new CD on my team. 

2. Leaders Eat Last, by Simon Sinek

Once you understand your leadership style, this book will help you decode how to be a leader people want to follow.

Sinek gets into why people do their best work for leaders who protect them, and why they shut down around leaders who don’t. It made me view leadership as debt I owe my team. If you see me get in the food line last, now you know why.

3. Unreasonable Hospitality, by Will Guidara

This is not technically a leadership book, but it’s the best book I’ve read on service. Being in service of your team, clients, and collaborators is not a nice-to-have; it’s often the thing people remember. 

This book changed how I think about professional relationships and reminded me that personal touches matter. Your reputation is built on the stories people tell when you’re not in the room.

4. The Culture Code, by Daniel Coyle

Then there’s the room you’re asking everyone to work in. What kind of culture are you building? 

The Culture Code is about the small behaviors that make people feel like they can speak up, take risks, and be part of something. It taught me that culture is not a vibe, a deck, or calling yourselves a “family,” but the tiny stuff you do every day.

5. The Cubs Way, Tom Verducci

Finally, this book teaches you how to build a team that actually wins. 

Swap “ballplayers” for “creatives,” and a lot of it still holds: Know people’s strengths and weaknesses; put the right people on the right assignments; and remember that great work usually takes longer than anyone wants it to. This is the book I return to when a team looks good on paper, but still isn’t quite clicking.

No book will magically make you a great leader. But if you’re a creative person who just got handed the keys and no manual, these five will at least give you a start.

The 2026 FIFA World Cup captured more than $10 billion in global ad spend, according to WARC Media estimates. That’s on top of the $2.8 billion FIFA collected from its 20 official sponsors, and before counting the dozens of non-sponsor brands that piled on for free.  

That’s an extraordinary amount of noise fighting for the same six billion potential viewers in the same six weeks. 

And that’s the main question the C-suite at these advertisers will be asking of their CMOs: Did their marketing break through and, ultimately, drive commercial success? 

Here are five lessons they can learn from the brands who did it right—and a few who missed opportunities along the way.

1. Build for the long-tail, not just the peak

Most World Cup advertisers planned a six week run and stopped there. Adidas did it differently. Starting with its five minute film starring Timothée Chalamet, the campaign was built on a long marketing runway and attached to real commercial goals. 

“Backyard Legends” is the latest chapter of “You Got This,” a campaign that’s been running since the 2024 Paris Olympics. It was preceded by successful product drops from Bad Bunny and Messi in early 2026, and followed by nationwide pop-ups inside Nordstrom stores, a Dick’s retail push timed to Messi’s Algeria hat-trick, and fan experiences across five host cities through its app.

The widespread effort paid off. On its April 2026 earnings call, Adidas said it booked roughly $292 million in World Cup product sales before kickoff, driving revenue up 7% to €6.6 billion. CEO Bjørn Gulden tied the campaign to Adidas closing the U.S. gap with Nike and guiding its full year to high-single-digit growth.

In that way, the World Cup became fuel for Adidas’ whole year, not a standalone spike.

Lesson No. 1: Start the drip months before your next tentpole and integrate retail, product, app, and content from the start to keep the campaign working well after the event is done.  

2. Find the unclaimed stories 

Many brands leaned into similar messages of communal joy, tension, the sheer love of “footie.” But hiding in plain sight, the tournament was telling a sharper story that no brand tapped into: the underdog against Goliath, the comeback from behind, the will to win that defines a champion. 

Cabo Verde, a nation of 500,000 ranked 67th, held Spain scoreless and took Messi’s Argentina to extra time before falling 3-2; Spain and Argentina overcame all odds to win against France and England, respectively; and Spain ultimately beat out defending champs Argentina for the World Cup Championship title. This is what the internet talked about. 

Brands like Nike missed the opportunity to tap into that conversation. Its “Rip the Script” platform was expansive enough to embrace all the content it developed, but failed to celebrate what the world was discussing as it happened. That dynamism would have given Nike’s campaign even greater relevance.

Lesson No. 2: Find the story not being told. Create a platform that has the flexibility to pivot from pre-produced content to on-the-field surprises so you can stay relevant throughout the tournament and after.

3.  Audit your talent

Another familiar playbook this year was using celebrities to make the game accessible to a new audience, honoring both the familiar legends and the new guard.  

That’s exactly where things went wrong. Suddenly, everyone was casting the same eight celebs. Beckham appeared in ads for more than ten sponsors. Messi showed up in almost 25% of tournament spots. It became hard to know which brand featured which player.   

YouGov found roughly 40% of U.S. World Cup followers noticed sponsors, but noticing and attributing are different. Shared casting erodes brand recognition massively.

Lesson No. 3: Brands avoid getting lost in a sea of celeb-sameness by ensuring their category conflict clauses extend to adjacent categories and by standing up social listening tools that track share of voice by talent.

4. Make the brand central to the story

The best work made the product and brand inseparable from the event itself.  

Brahma Beer’s World Cup ad exuded the sheer joy of Brazil, as well as its cultural pride in football and the attendant skepticism about it, while keeping the product central to the storyline. Nike, conversely, could have been any brand’s sports marketing. 

Lesson No. 4: Could you swap your product for a rival’s without changing the ad? If so, that’s a prop, not a winning proposition.

5.  Don’t broadcast, have a conversation

So many brands missed an opportunity to create the two-way dialogue crucial to reaching Gen Z and Millennials.

Packaging—the most underrated medium in brand-building—had a great highlight in Café Bustelo’s “Game Face” campaign. The brand shipped more than one million cans, designed by hyper-local artists across Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, and Colombia, with temporary face-tattoo kits. The tattoos went viral, as people used them to promote their flag, their country, their teams, themselves, and the product—in one fell swoop. 

Lesson No. 5: When trying to reach younger audiences, don’t broadcast your message; make it a conversation they can be a part of.

Many in the marketing and tech world have dismissed the Phia scandal as just another affiliate fraud story. 

But it’s not.

This is not a story about the distribution of affiliate payouts. Phia may have taken more than $10 million from merchants, as reported by Bloomberg. The scale and audacity of the alleged misconduct are far greater than many people currently appreciate.

The allegations draw comparisons to Honey, which was accused of taking credit for referrals that had already been earned by another publisher. 

But that misses the more important story. 

Phia, if the allegations are true, did not simply take credit for an existing affiliate referral—it created an affiliate commission that should not have existed. So any shopping session in which the extension is active could become an affiliate transaction, even when no affiliate was ever present.

That distinction matters. 

According to testing conducted by Capital One Shopping and Edelman, Phia’s iOS Safari extension allegedly opens background tabs and fires affiliate tracking links without an explicit user action when consumers visit participating merchants’ websites. 

These forced clicks are not merely a technical violation of affiliate-network rules, they can lead to legal penalties, and they can cut into an advertisers’ bottom line.

Nearly two decades ago, Edelman uncovered similar conduct by eBay affiliates Shawn Hogan and Brian Dunning, who caused affiliate tracking to be invoked without users clicking. Edelman reported his findings to eBay, which referred the matter to the FBI. Both men were subsequently charged with wire fraud, pleaded guilty and served prison sentences. 

Dunning’s indictment alleged more than $5.3 million in compensation, while Hogan’s alleged more than $15.5 million. 

Phia has not been criminally charged, and the facts of the cases are not identical, but the precedent demonstrates how seriously forced-click schemes can be treated when they are used to collect unearned commissions.

TBPN estimated the revenue allegedly taken at $12 million, and while I haven’t been able to independently verify that, my conversations with industry insiders who have access to enormous amounts of data indicate a similar figure.

That difference changes who is harmed

With Honey, merchants still paid a single affiliate commission on a completed sale, while those commissions shifted among publishers within the affiliate ecosystem. Publishers objected, but advertisers viewed it as a redistribution problem rather than an increase in cost.

The allegations against Phia are different. As Edelman put it: “merchants are the victims of forced clicks.” 

If affiliate clicks are being generated without a legitimate referral, advertisers may be paying commissions on sales that would have occurred anyway. This means Phia’s alleged conduct directly damaged merchants’ bottom lines.

The scale is potentially much larger than Honey’s as well. 

Affiliate marketing typically represents only a portion of an advertiser’s online sales, meaning Honey could affect only transactions already flowing through the affiliate channel. 

Forced clicks, by contrast, reach a larger share of commerce activity.

As Edelman told me, “with forced clicks, both click-through rate and revenue per user will be implausibly high.” These economics should have raised questions internally.

Edelman is unequivocal about intent. He calls it “misconduct,” and outright rejects that this behavior could have come from a software bug: “Based on the nature of the violation, forcing clicks is not something that can be unintentional.”

Another notable aspect of Edelman’s research is that the alleged behavior appears to be concentrated on mobile through an iOS Safari extension, rather than a traditional desktop browser extension. 

Historically, desktop extensions have received far greater scrutiny from researchers, networks and competing publishers. Whether the mobile implementation was intentionally chosen to avoid detection or simply exploited an area that receives less oversight remains an open question.

For the digital marketing ecosystem, however, the most important question is not what Phia allegedly did. It is why the broader ecosystem failed to detect it sooner.

Affiliate marketing depends on trust. Publishers trust that legitimate referrals will be credited. Advertisers trust that commissions reflect genuine incremental value. Consumers trust that cashback and loyalty programs operate fairly. Every high-profile controversy erodes that confidence, regardless of whether it involves Honey, Phia or the next shopping assistant.

As shopping increasingly shifts toward AI-powered agents and browser automation, the industry’s reputation will depend less on its ability to track commissions and more on its ability to demonstrate that those commissions were legitimately earned.

There’s a common narrative around Gen Z: they have short attention spans, they’re chronically online, and they’re disengaged. And to reach them, marketers need to jump on the hottest microtrend and flood them with content. 

But after a year of building Sunnie, Hello Sunshine’s Gen Z-focused media, experiential, and lifestyle brand, I don’t believe Gen Z has the attention problem that most people assume. 

When something catches their interest, they’ll spend hours exploring endless rabbit holes—reading books, rummaging thrift store racks, and yes, scrolling through TikToks. 

They aren’t incapable of paying attention, they’re just decisive about what deserves it—especially in today’s over-saturated media environment.

Being intentional about what deserves their time—and their joy—is a way for them to reclaim control and agency.

Here’s how marketers can crack the Gen Z code:

Start with a community-first strategy vs a social-first strategy 

One of the biggest misconceptions about Gen Z is that their lives happen entirely online. With the loss of third spaces, Gen Z is yearning to take the group chat offline. Social platforms are often where their discovery starts, but we’re increasingly seeing that they’re looking for continued connection beyond social media.

Ninety percent of Gen Z girls value brands that help create opportunities for real-world connection, according to a study we conducted with Westfield Rise. We also found that 73% view malls as a primary social gathering place. They’re not necessarily shopping, but looking for somewhere to spend time together.

The brands that are breaking through today understand that offline communities are often more important than the online ones, and in-person vibes cannot be replicated.

Dig the rabbit hole, don’t build the billboard

Traditional marketing often focuses on reach, but we’ve found that Gen Z responds to targeted depth. 

Whether it’s wellness, fashion, sports, or niche internet culture, this generation is constantly exploring rabbit holes that help them discover who they are. The deeper they go, the more they find a sense of belonging. The opportunity for brands is to be part of these journeys and to build alongside their consumers. 

Some of the most successful experiences we’ve created at Sunnie, such as Sunniefest or Sunnie Reads, have worked because we created passion-based communities—we built third spaces where Gen Z immediately felt like they belonged. 

For us, the goal wasn’t exposure, it was creating energy that can only be felt in-person and building low pressure environments that allow Gen Z to follow their curiosities and find community.

Make experiences that require them to slow down 

With our lives moving so fast, the things that stick are the ones that slow us down. 

Gen Z wants to slow down to counter their constant digital overstimulation—whether they pick up an analog hobby like bedazzling, start a birdwatching club, or master the art of “nothing-maxxing.” They want content and experiences that will stretch time and get them out of the endless scroll. 

Brands need to be as intentional with how they show up as Gen Z is with their time. 

Bring back joy of ‘stumbling upon’

For previous youth generations, exploration and discovery was self-directed: ripping out magazines for outfit inspo or swapping CDs with college dormmates to listen to a new-to-you band. 

Gen Z’s world is curated by algorithm, and the randomness of finding something you love on your own has slipped away. Yes, the algorithm is shaped by their likes and interests but it’s also informed by their insecurities—and they are looking for off-ramps. Novelty lies in discovering something on their own, to curate cool for themselves. 

The approach of “surprise and delight” can no longer be superficial, fleeting moments but rather need to evolve into experiences where Gen Z can discover another side of themselves, and be a moment of exploration.

Co-creation is the new authenticity 

When we started Sunnie, the room was filled with mostly Millennials, Gen Xers, and a few Gen Zers. We quickly realized that we needed Gen Z to be both our inner and outer voices. We created a Sunnie Advisory Board filled with Gen Z trailblazers to help us both conceptualize Sunnie and bring the brand to life. They advise us on strategy, creative feedback, and telling us when we need to pivot.  

We learned that Gen Z doesn’t want to be treated as an audience, they need to be treated as co-creators. In our research, 87% said they want a role in the creative process with brands. That’s a staggering shift from traditional marketing assumptions.

For this generation, collaboration isn’t a campaign mechanic. They expect to have the opportunity to shape the culture they’re being asked to join.

In a world where life feels overprogrammed, optimized to be frictionless, and where the battle for Gen Z’s attention is constant, the brands that will break through are the ones that create space to be human, play in the spontaneity, and allow Gen Z to feel all their senses in ways that respect their time and attention. 

The brands that will build the future with Gen Z will be the ones that respect their attention, reminding them how to be human, and adding some friction back in the best ways. 

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.