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.

Twenty years ago, as I prepared to graduate with a degree in English, everyone asked me the same question: “What are you going to do with that?” 

At the time, it was fair. Specializing in language wasn’t a direct path into business or tech. 

Today, that same skill has a new label: prompt engineering. 

The ability to write clear, explicit instructions that provide context and guide interpretation has become valuable again in the age of large language models, because AI systems are only as precise as the directions and context they’re given. 

Eventually though, the model “forgets” what you told it previously. Even with stored documents to “remind” the AI of past progress, at a certain point, the model can only process so much at a time. 

And that’s the key: to get the most out of your AI models at work, it’s less about having the smartest model, and more about the context you provide.

Without enterprise data, your AI models are commodities

That context often comes with access to enterprise data. Whether it’s structured or unstructured, that data—including historical performance data, customer behavior, or business constraints—can provide much more specific outputs around your needs.

Ask an AI coding assistant without access to your data to build you a bespoke analytics application, and it’ll give you something polished, possibly even technically sound, but it won’t reflect your reality. 

Give that same model governed access to marketing performance, customer cohorts, pricing dynamics, inventory signals and sentiment trends within a secure environment, and the output changes dramatically. 

This is the shift many organizations are underestimating. Foundation models like Claude, OpenAI, and Gemini—which are trained on vast datasets and are designed to generalize across use cases—are rapidly becoming commoditized. 

Your data is not. With marketing data and business data in the same enterprise environment, you can move beyond dashboards and into real machine learning workflows much faster than most teams expect. 

If this English major can do it, so can you

I’ve seen this firsthand. 

I was able to do work that would ordinarily require a month—coordinating across teams, standing up environments, tuning models—in one week of focused work, in between my day-to-day responsibilities.  

An AI coding assistant worked behind the scenes, configuring hyperparameter variations and writing lines of code, as I focused on defining the business question, evaluating the output, and iterating.

While this doesn’t make us all data scientists overnight, it absolutely changes the pace at which teams can explore, test, and operationalize predictive models. 

If you let AI operate directly within your governed enterprise data, it makes experimentation faster and you get results much more efficiently.

Your data is the memory of your business, and contains the patterns that define it.

AI helps you surface and act on that memory faster, but only if it can operate securely within that context. 

For your marketing and business goals to be successful, without exposing your competitive edge, you need to bring the model to your secure data and not the other way around. 

Models will evolve. Capabilities will expand. But context will remain king.

Before marketers learn AI, or the language of the boardroom, or purpose, or storytelling, or any of the other things we keep telling them they need to master, many of them need to learn something more basic. They need to learn marketing.

There, I said it. I know it sounds provocative. It isn’t meant to be. It’s just what the data says.

I think many American marketers would be even better if they had a basic, up-to-date, operating model of marketing. And I can prove it. 

Earlier this year I worked with the global market research firm Ipsos to measure marketing knowledge in the U.S. We surveyed a representative sample of American marketers and, among a battery of other questions, subtly asked them ten simple sub-undergraduate questions about marketing offering them four multiple choice answers to choose from. 

The questions were basic. The team at Ipsos told me they were too easy. And they had a point. The questions asked basic things like whether marketers knew what a quantitative market research method was, what penetration means, about whether they knew what segmentation targeting and positioning was, and whether they could name the four Ps. 

The results are incredible.

More than 40% of American marketers don’t know what positioning means. Half of them don’t understand what penetration is. Two thirds of them cannot identify a quantitative research method. 54% of them don’t know what “above the line” or “omnichannel” means. 

All told, two thirds of American marketers would fail the most basic test of marketing knowledge.

Meanwhile, most marketers rate their skills very highly. Eighty-four percent of American marketers rate themselves above average at marketing—a statistical and disciplinary impossibility. 

How do we explain this contradiction? 

Well, we can use the same Ipsos survey to try and find answers. Controlling for all the other variables, we examined a host of potential correlations to try and find out why so many American marketers know so little about marketing. 

The role of the marketer was not significant. Neither was their sector or their age or seniority. The size of their company was slightly meaningful, with a small improvement for marketers working at bigger companies. 

But there was one variable that provided most of the variance in those that failed versus passed a basic test of marketing: formal training. 

By formal training I mean a University course or professional certificate or online training in marketing. And by untrained, I mean those marketers whose most extended training stretches to workshops, on-the-job learning and self-training via YouTube and other means. 

If an American marketer had formal training in marketing, they were more than six times more likely to pass a basic test of marketing. Hardly a surprise, right?

Except in marketing, we have built a culture of making it okay to work in the profession with zero formal training. 

Senior marketers will even suggest training in marketing is a deficit for career progression. 

Make the case for marketing training and you will immediately encounter marketers vigorously opposing the point. “Look at all the senior marketers who have prospered without any formal training,” they will say. 

“And look at this anecdotal experience I had of a trained marketer who was not very effective,” someone else will add. 

In essence, ignore the obvious correlation between training and knowledge and look at isolated outliers instead.

There are clearly many great marketers who have built excellent careers without formal training. But those same marketers would be even better with it, and the data says so.

According to the Ipsos data, if you have been formally trained, you are also more influential within the organization, more motivated, more strategically adept, better at budgeting, happier in your career progression and much more likely to work in marketing for the next decade. 

That message should not be scandalous. It should be obvious. Training in marketing makes you better at marketing. More knowledgeable. More confident. Happier. More influential. More strategic. 

All the things marketers need in the age of AI that approaches. 

It takes relatively little time and investment to gain a world-class training in marketing these days. 

The next time someone suggests that training in marketing is optional or even sub-optimal help me to push back. Direct them to the Ipsos data. Move their finger from the outlier dot to the big fat line that correlates marketing training with marketing knowledge. 

Read the data here.

After over 25 years in marketing, I learned that many targeting decisions aren’t driven by sound commercial logic.

They are driven by faulty logic, a lack of empathy, and the recurring fantasy that the consumer most attractive to marketers is automatically the most valuable one.

The same mistakes always come back, usually wrapped in a persuasive deck and introduced as “growth opportunities.” They are not. They’re just old errors in fresh packaging.

Here are the three biggest mistakes:

Being tyrannized by the youths

There is a sentence you always hear in marketing meetings, especially when the data suggests older consumers deserve more focus: “We need to recruit the next generation.” 

And if you push back, someone will often add the supposedly decisive line: “After all, people over 50 won’t be around forever.”

In reality, it is just a polished way of ignoring the people currently paying the bills to chase the ones we find more exciting.

In many categories, older consumers have more spending power, buy more often, and are cheaper to reach efficiently. They often are the commercial center of gravity, not some sleepy legacy segment sitting politely in the corner.

And yet teams still talk as if older consumers are drifting into irrelevance.

They get thrown into a lazy catch-all bucket, like “50+,” as if a 52-year-old, a 64-year-old, and a 72-year-old are the same consumer.

Meanwhile, younger consumers are sliced into ever finer categories: 18-24, 25-34, and so on, as if the difference between 24 and 25 is a major anthropological event.

This is all because of an old fantasy: “Win them young and keep them forever”.

But that idea has aged far worse than the consumers it dismisses. 

Today, churn is high, loyalty is brittle, and many rejuvenation efforts pull off the neat trick of irritating the current base without winning enough new buyers to compensate.

Marketers and agencies target people like themselves.

Targeting teams tend to drift toward people who feel familiar. In other words, they target people very much like themselves: urban, educated, connected, progressive, often with above-average buying power.

Meanwhile, the brand’s actual heavy buyers may be older, more mainstream, more suburban, less fashionable, or simply less enjoyable to imagine on a mood board.

Steve Harrison argues in Can’t Sell, Won’t Sell that it would not matter that marketers and agency people come from a narrow sociological profile, if they had unusually strong empathy.

Unfortunately they are not, in general, especially gifted at understanding people unlike themselves.

Not only does that explain why so much marketing isn’t aimed at the people most likely to buy the brand, it also explains the recurrent urge to “premiumize” brands.

Not every move upmarket is strategic insight. Sometimes, it is just marketers building for people more like themselves.

I once saw an agency label a segment of older, lower-income whisky and gin consumers “the elderly and defeated.”

That is not segmentation. That is social snobbery pretending to be strategic insight.

And besides being offensive, it told you everything about the mindset behind it.

Bud Light and Jaguar are obvious examples of what happens when brands start expressing codes that make more sense to the people managing them than to the people buying them.

But quieter versions of the same mistake happen every day, in less visible categories, with less press coverage and just as much damage.

The brand is not you. The target is not the audience you instinctively understand best, or the one you feel most naturally at ease with. It is the one most likely to buy profitably, and to keep the business alive.

An under-index becomes a recommendation, when it should just be an observation

This type of reasoning feels very analytical until you think about it for more than thirty seconds.

A team notices that the brand under-indexes with some group and immediately concludes that this group must be the next growth opportunity.

By that logic, the U.K. would automatically be a high-potential market for solar panels simply because penetration is lower than in Spain or Italy.

But every brand under-indexes somewhere, and this is not how opportunity analysis works.

On its own, relative weakness proves almost nothing.

The real question is where the profitable upside really sits.

Is the group large enough to matter? Can it be reached and converted efficiently? And once converted, is it genuinely valuable?

In the end, most targeting mistakes are driven less by consumer reality than by marketers projecting their own tastes, anxieties, and social preferences onto the market, then occasionally reinforcing them with some remarkably faulty logic.

That would be harmless if targeting were a minor decision. But targeting is one of the most important choices a brand can make, and one of the easiest ways to hurt a brand when done badly.

Principal media buying has moved from a quiet industry practice to a very public flashpoint. 

While much of the current discussion focuses on digital and programmatic channels, principal media spans the full media ecosystem, from traditional linear channels to programmatic marketplaces.

The practice has long existed across traditional media—broadcast, cable, radio, and outdoor—where agencies could leverage scale to secure and resell inventory. What’s changed is not the existence of principal buying, but its scale, complexity, and the degree to which it now sits at the center of agency economics.

This is an extremely sensitive topic, but the recent surge in reporting, coupled with broader industry tension, makes it clear: this once-niche practice is reshaping the economics and the trust dynamics of our business.

The case for principal media

Those that support principal media largely point to cost efficiency. And that is, in many cases, true. Some marketers may see 10%–15% savings versus open-market buying.

But the advantage runs deeper than that.

When price becomes disproportionately weighted in an agency review, those agencies with scaled principal media practices have a structural edge. 

Not just because they can offer lower pricing, but because the profits generated through principal media can subsidize other services—sometimes significantly. It’s not uncommon to see teams provided at no charge for a period as part of a broader commercial arrangement.

In this environment, clients seeking cost extraction as a primary goal will naturally gravitate toward agencies with scaled principal offerings.

There’s also a second-order benefit. The profits generated through principal media can be reinvested into capabilities—whether through acquisitions or in-house development—that strengthen an agency’s competitive position. 

Consider the scale of investment some holding companies are now making in AI and data infrastructure. Those investments are not happening in a vacuum.

The case against principal media

The concerns around principal media are well-documented and deeply interconnected.

The most visible issue is lack of transparency, due to hidden fees, undisclosed margins, and opaque pricing structures.

While some agencies disclose their margins on principal media, many do not—unless explicitly required by contract. According to the ANA, only 57% of marketers have governance rules in place around this practice.

I saw this firsthand. During the onboarding of a major retail client, we discovered their media flowcharts showed only aggregate costs—no partner-level detail. When pressed, the incumbent agency declined to disclose rates, arguing they “belonged to the agency.”

The issue quickly becomes a conflict of interest. 

Agencies are no longer purely incentivized to act in the client’s best interest—they are also incentivized to maximize their own margin. That can mean prioritizing inventory they own or deals that carry higher spreads, rather than what may perform best.

And when pricing is opaque and incentives are unclear, trust erodes.

Agencies rarely lose clients over pricing. They lose them over trust.

It deepens tension in the agency-client relationship

These issues are symptoms of a larger structural shift.

For years, clients have pushed for lower costs—both in media and in agency fees. 

Procurement has taken a more prominent role in decision-making, often with a mandate to deliver savings. Consultants frequently reinforce this dynamic, leading with cost guarantees rather than growth.

Even though principal media can deliver both cost efficiency and performance, it fundamentally alters the agency-client relationship.

Agencies were traditionally positioned as trusted intermediaries—acting on behalf of their clients. Principal media shifts that role. Agencies become market participants, with financial exposure and competing incentives.

You can’t be both a fiduciary and a counterpart in the same transaction without introducing tension.

A former colleague of mine, now on the client side, ran a global media review. 

Three of the four consultants competing for the assignment focused heavily on savings. Only one focused on strategy and topline growth. That’s the one she hired—but the broader trend is clear.

In this environment, agencies have been forced to find new revenue models. And at the same time, clients increasingly expect outcomes, not process.

How to move forward when outcomes are paramount

Principal media is not going away. In fact, it is likely to accelerate. The economic pressures that drive it exist across all channels.

Even smaller, independent agencies are now establishing their own principal practices. But what’s interesting is that many of these independents are taking a different approach:

• Disclosing margins
• Requiring opt-in rather than opt-out
• Comparing buys with and without principal media

That may signal where the model evolves next—not away from principal media, but toward greater transparency and client control.

At the same time, the clients need to shift their thinking.

An emphasis on cost extraction is a race to the bottom. Agencies can always find cheaper media. The more important question is what that media actually delivers.

Does it command attention?

Does it place brands in environments that enhance perception?

Does it drive meaningful business outcomes?

Because better media builds better brands.